National Science Foundation renews funding for U. Center for Complex Materials

The National Science Foundation this week renewed its funding for the Princeton Center for Complex Materials until October 2020.

The funding for the University totals about $6.4 million.

NSF awards follow a six-year cycle, and the grant is conditional on following the research rules associated with the funding. These rules require faculty from different fields to collaborate while executing the plan outlined in their research proposal.

The PCCM is designated by the federal government as a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. NSF program officer Daniele Finotello said that it is necessary to fund these centers to promote the type of interdisciplinary research required to make advances in materials research.

“In order to tackle a very complex problem, you need to gather people that have complementary skills, people that have complementary expertise,” he explained. “People may be affiliated with different departments. An MRSEC [Materials Research Science and Engineering Center] capitalizes on the interaction of faculty in several different departments. That guarantees a particular problem will be understood and solved at a faster rate.”

PCCM researchers coauthor papers that demonstrate to the Foundation the intimate level at which they are collaborating, physics professor and PCCM directorNai Phuan Ong said.

“The activities run the gamut from condensed matter physics, to electrical engineering, to materials science engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry, even to biological materials,” he explained. “You have to show evidence that it’s not simply 20 faculty members funded to stay in their lab and work on their own project.”

The competition among research institutions to secure funding from the NSF can be quite fierce, as approximately 200 universities feel they merit support and around 100 actually apply for funding at each cycle, Ong added. Only 12 institutions, including the University, received funding in this cycle.

“We’re delighted, because it is a vote of confidence for the team of investigators,” Dean for Research Pablo Debenedetti said.

In order to request funding from the NSF, a research center like the PCCM has to submit a detailed proposal, including a specific budget, as well as the institution’s research ideas, Debenedetti said.

“A proposal is a huge undertaking, it involves herding 30 cats — we call faculty ‘cats’ — getting them to chip in and write a coherent proposal,” Ong said. “We’ve been lucky in renewing this maybe six or seven times now.”

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The renewed funding will support three major so-called interdisciplinary research groups, also called “thrusts,” within PCCM, focusing on the topological phases of metal, including Dirac semimetals and semiconductors, glass formation in polymers and ultra-coherent quantum materials and quantum computation, Ong explained. Around eight faculty members are working together for each project.

Another component of the PCCM’s work involves outreach, both for education and industry. About 40 percent of the funding from the NSF will be used for outreach purposes, Ong said.

One of the challenges of coordinating the educational component is making sure that all faculty at the Center have enough opportunities to get involved, PCCM Educational Outreach Director Daniel Steinberg said.

“The faculty are so busy. They are dedicated, but teaching children and working with the public is not their usual job,” Steinberg said. “I’m asking them to come out of their comfort zone.”

The Princeton University Materials Academy is among several educational outreach programs run by PCCM.

“We enroll roughly 20 students from Trenton high schools. These represent the best of high school students, and they come and work for nine weeks to acquire lab experience,” Ong said. “For many of them, this is the first time they’ve had a real science lab class. The success of them, first of all, graduating from high school and then going on to colleges, is very high, close to 90-95 percent.”

While the impact of these programs is hard to measure directly, the PCCM carries out surveys or evaluations to assess the results, Steinberg explained.

“The more we put out, the more people ask for it,” he said. “I know there’s a tremendous demand we’re trying to meet.”

The Center also annually organizes calls for “seed projects,” which invite faculty or associate faculty all over campus to submit their best research ideas, Ong said.

“If we deem them to be promising, that will lead to a new kind of battery or solar cell, then we fund it out of our budget,” he said. “These seed projects sometimes blossom into new trusts for the next cycle of renewal.”