Training and mentoring opportunities for junior researchers in particle physics, cell biology, mechanobiology and materials science will be created in connection with four partnerships that are funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia.
NSF on 26 September announced US$94 million to support four new Science and Technology Centers (STCs). Each awardee will receive up to $24 million over a 5-year period, with the possibility of a continuation for 5 more years. In addition to these latest awards, NSF supports eight active STCs across the United States. Each STC involves partnerships across universities, federal labs, industry and other organizations.
The new centres, says NSF, are expected to recruit, retain and mentor junior researchers from groups traditionally underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and maths. An NSF spokesman says that principal investigators (PIs) are likely to recruit graduate students, postdocs and undergraduates at each centre’s host lab(s).
Below are the new centres, their PIs, co-investigators and collaborators.
● The Center for Bright Beams, J. Ritchie Patterson and Georg H. Hoffstaetter, Cornell University, New York. This centre will aim to enhance accelerator capabilities and contribute to scientific advances in physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines. It partners Cornell with the University of Chicago; Chicago State University; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the University of Florida; the University of Maryland (UMD); Brigham Young University; Morehouse College; Clark Atlanta University; the University of Toronto; the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science.
● Center for Cellular Construction, Wallace Marshall, Zev J. Gartner, Wendell Lim, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). This centre will develop tools to predict, design and test the impact on cellular function of changes to their internal organization. It will also create tools for building multicellular and multi-organism structures and develop living ‘bioreactors’ that will lead to marketable products. The centre partners with University of California, Berkeley (UCB); San Francisco State University; Stanford University; the IBM Almaden Research Center; and the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco.
● Science and Technology Center for Engineering MechanoBiology, Yale E. Goldman, Vivek B. Shenoy, Rebecca G. Wells, University of Pennsylvania; Guy Genin, Ram V. Dixit, Washington University in St Louis; Christopher Chen, Boston University (BU). The centre aims to discover the principles that govern how biological systems communicate using molecular and cellular methods, and partners the University of Pennsylvania with Washington University; UMD; the New Jersey Institute of Technology; Bryn Mawr College; Alabama State University; and BU.
● Science and Technology Center on Real-Time Functional Imaging, Margaret Murnane, Rafael Piestun, Markus B. Raschke, University of Colorado, Boulder; Naomi S. Ginsberg, UCB, Jianwei Miao, UCLA. This centre aims to advance real-time functional imaging by moving away from using microscopes that employ a single imaging method — optical, X-ray, nano-probe or electron microscopy, for example — by combining and improving those techniques. Collaborators want to better understand the structure and functionality of various types of matter as they change over time. The centre partners the University of Colorado, Boulder, with Fort Lewis College; Florida International University; UCB; UCLA; and the University of California, Irvine.
For more information, see here.
Suggested posts
PhD students: how to improve your communication skills – and why you should
Recent comments on this blog
African astronomy and how one student broke into the field
From Doctorate to Data Science: A very short guide
Work/life balance: New definitions