MRSECwide industrial educationoutreach activities

1
MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach
activities

• MRSEC contributions to education involving the
  industrial sector
• Undergraduate/graduate/postdoc collaborating with
  industry
• Lifelong learning and skill building for
  industrial scientists and engineers
• Challenges intellectual property, retention of
  technical contacts
• Best practices vary by research area

Survey years 2002-2004 18 of 27 MRSECs reporting
(November 2004)
2
MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach
activities

• Survey years 2002 - 2004
• 90 workshops and symposia involving more than
  3600 industrial participants
• Collaborative research with industry
• - 93 MRSEC undergraduates
• - 228 graduate students/postdocs
• Effective leveraging and two-way knowledge
  exchange
• Early student exposure to the industrial sector
• Most students supported by a combination of MRSEC
  and industrial funds

Graduate students and postdocs performing
collaborative research with industrial
partners(228 total)
3
Spintronics and Information Technology
An Electronic Pump for Nuclear Spins

• Magnetics Heterostructures IRG at the University
  of Minnesota
• A spin-based storage information device that
  combines a material ordinarily used for
  information storage (iron) with a common
  semiconductor (gallium arsenide).
• Significant advance electron spin - the property
  that carries information - is retained when it
  passes into the semiconductor.
• Ordinarily this information, often referred to as
  spin polarization, decays in roughly
  one-billionth of a second.
• In this new device the electrons transfer their
  spin to the nuclei that form the cores of atoms
  in the semiconductor.
• Unlike the electrons, the nuclei can retain their
  spin for many minutes, after which their spin can
  be read by electrons.
• This type of read/write device therefore can
  allow nuclear spin to be used as a processing
  element in computer.
• J. Strand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 036602
  (2003).

Spin-polarized electrons (orange spheres) tunnel
through the barrier separating ferromagnetic iron
(orange) from a semiconductor (gray). Once
inside the semiconductor, the electrons transfer
their spin to nuclei (gray spheres).
University of Minnesota MRSEC
4
Polymersomes Tough Vesicles Made from Diblock
Copolymers

• A joint effort between the University of
  Minnesota and University of Pennsylvania MRSECs
• Giant polymersomes 10x tougher than lipid
  vesicles
• Less permeable to water than typical phospholipid
  bilayers
• Storage vehicles for reagents candidates for
  targeted drug delivery

Amphiphilic block copolymer lipid-like
bilayer
Vesicle immediately after electroformation
After encapsulation of 10-kD Texas Red-labeled
dextran
Science, 1999, 284, 1143