Penn Receives $3M NSF Grant for Research Partnership

The University of Puerto Rico and University of Pennsylvania have been awarded a $3 million National Science Foundation grant to support their Partnership for Research and Education in Materials. The PREM award extends the decade-spanning relationship between UPR and Penn’s Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, in which faculty, staff and students share resources and collaborate on interdisciplinary research related to materials science.

The PREM program is funded by the NSF’s Division of Materials Research with the aim of building long-term partnerships between minority-serving educational institutions and NSF research centers such as the LRSM, which hosts a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

“We see this as a critical pathway for increasing diversity in STEM fields, both at Penn and beyond,” said Arjun Yodh, director of the LRSM and co-director of the PREM. “Moreover, all participating institutions are doing excellent science, and a long paper trail of collaborative interdisciplinary materials publications has resulted from our partnership.”

In addition to Yodh, 10 Penn professors were co-investigators on the proposal and will directly participate in the 2015–20 PREM. They include Jay Kikkawa, A. T. Charlie Johnson, and Eugene Mele from Penn Arts and Sciences’ Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Ivan Dmochowski, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Chemistry Feng Gai, and Hirschmann-Makineni Professor of Chemistry Gary Molander from its Department of Chemistry. Ritesh Agarwal of Penn Engineering and Christopher Murray, Richard Perry University Professor with appointments in chemistry and engineering, are also part of the consortium.

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