Engineering faculty earn Materials Research Seed Grant funding

Seven innovative materials research projects will receive a total of $300,000 in funding through The Ohio State University Materials Research Seed Grant Program.

The program support advances in materials research of varying scopes. It is jointly funded and managed by the Institute for Materials Research (IMR), Center for Emergent Materials (CEM) and Center for Exploration of Novel Complex Materials (ENCOMM).

The enhanced Materials Research Seed Grant Program became available to the university's materials research community in Winter 2011. It provides multiple tiers of internal funding opportunities to support basic research, collaborative research teams, translational R&D with industry partners, and global partnership opportunities. 

This year, one Multidisciplinary Team Building Grant (MTBG) and six Exploratory Materials Research Grant (EMRG) awards were selected after a thorough internal and external review process.

The project “Magic‐angle Bilayers of Correlated Electron Materials” is set to receive $60,000 as the 2019 MTBG grant recipient. Marc Bockrath, professor in the Department of Physics, serves as principal investigator. The grant supports multidisciplinary materials research teams to compete effectively for federal block-funding opportunities.

EMRG grants enable nascent and innovative materials research to emerge to the point of being competitive for external funding. Each award is $40,000.

• Room-Temperature III-Nitride Based Single-Photon Emission | Prof. Shamsul Arafin, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Design and Local Structure Identification of Stable Electrode-Electrolyte Interfaces | Prof. Vicky Doan-Nguyen, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
• In-situ Characterization of High Temperature Alloy Phase Transformations at the Nanoscale with Simultaneous Enthalpy Quantification | Prof. Joerg Jinschek, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
• Epitaxial Lattice-matched Monoclinic Fe2O3/Ga2O3 Superlattices for Tunable Magneto-electrics | Prof. Roberto Myers, Departments of Materials Science and Engineering; Physics; and Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Designing MOFs with Cooperative Binding Mechanisms for Selective Small Molecule Separations | Prof. Casey Wade, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Magneto-responsive Material for Reconfigurable Surface Properties | Prof. Ruike Zhao, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering