Research

Seed Funding Program

Through the Seed Funding Program, the Center for Emergent Materials plans to respond quickly and effectively to new opportunities that will broaden its scope by pursuing high risk/high impact and transformative research. The Seed Funding Program will target specific research areas that are unrelated to the current Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs) - areas that are either too high risk and/ or have too great a lag between inception and funding through conventional funding channels. However, synergy with the mission of the CEM is expected. All regular faculty of The Ohio State University who currently are not members of the CEM are eligible to apply for seed funding.

Seed funding is split into two parallel funding instruments - Rapid Response grants and Strategic Interest grants.

Rapid Response Grants:

Rapid Response grants will provide funding to research that broadens the scope of the CEM by responding to rapidly emerging opportunities within the broad purview of the Seed Funding Program described above. (Examples include support for faculty changing fields, strengthening/developing ties to industry, the development of interdisciplinary education, the purchase of capital equipment to enhance collaborative research, etc.) The grants will provide funds of up to $25,000 to be expended over a 6-month period.

Strategic Interest Grants:

Strategic Interest grants will provide funding for research that broadens the scope of the CEM by developing areas of strategic interest to the materials community. Proposals that demonstrate potential synergy with ongoing CEM activities and/or the potential to nucleate interdisciplinary collaborations are preferred. The grants will provide funds of up to $50,000 to be expended over a 12-month period.

HYBRID MATERIALS is the area targeted for the 2009 Strategic Interest grants.

Seed Awards 2009-10

Roberto Myers, Department of Materials Science & Engineering "Towards Room Temperature Spin-Injection/Detection in Wide Band Gap Semiconductors"

Jessica Winter, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Co-PI R. Sooryakumar, Department of Physics, "Multifunctional Hybrid Nanomaterials: Synthesis and Manipulation"

Renewal of Yi Zhao, Department of Biomedical Engineering "Microstructured Polymer Nanofibers for Skeletal Muscle Restoration"

Renewal of Michael Poirier, Department of Physics "Heterogeneous Magnetic Particles for Force and Torque Sensing: A New Approach for Single Molecule Biology"

Seed Funding Program Board

Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics

Julia S. Meyer, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics

Michael Mills, Taine G. McDougal Professor of Engineering, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Michael Paulaitis, Ohio Eminent Scholar, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

H. Lee Mosbacker, Chief Technology Officer, Traycer Diagnostic Systems (External Member)

Robert J. Davis, Director, Nanotech West Laboratories