Since 2004, the Division of Materials Research at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made several awards to help grow partnerships between minority-serving institutions. The division’s Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials Research (PREM) program works to increase diversity, recruitment, retention, and degree attainment in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and engineering.
Recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara announced a PREM award that will help scientists at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU), University of California, Los Angeles, and UC Santa Barbara leverage their research to create materials, which degrade in a short time, to replace plastics that can take hundreds of years to break down.
According to Sonia Fernandez, Javier Read de Alaniz, a UC Santa Barbara professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will collaborate with his alma mater, NMHU, in the effort. Read de Alaniz directs the National Science Foundation-supported BioPolymers, Automated Cellular Infrastructure, Flow, and Integrated Chemistry: Materials Innovation Platform, or BioPACIFIC MIP for short. The platform is located at UC Santa Barbara and UCLA.
“This award will impact researchers underrepresented in STEM, mainly Hispanic or Latino,” Read de Alaniz told Fernandez. “NMHU plays a vital role in educating Hispanic students pursuing a college degree and through this partnership it will enable BioPACIFIC MIP to deliver on its promise to make biomaterial discovery resources available to a broad and diverse national user base.”
The joint effort will focus on machine learning, materials synthesis, high-throughput automated chemistry/biosynthesis, and organic-inorganic materials applications.
“The NMHU-BioPACIFIC MIP collaboration in design, synthesis and application of metal-organic hybrid biomaterials will enable continuing success in materials science research, research training, and education at NMHU, and will provide unique opportunities to Hispanic students in Northern New Mexico,” Read de Alaniz added. “The research scope of the partnership will leverage research strengths in machine learning, crystal engineering, and characterization of materials with magnetic and thermal properties at NMHU with expertise, high-throughput synthesis, and characterization at BioPACIFIC MIP.”
To date, the PREM initiative has trained more than 125 postdocs and helped 1,500 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students graduate with a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree. The initiative has also produced a range of results, from new materials for quantum devices and electronics to live-cell imaging.
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