The UW Advanced Materials Industrial Consortium now has two co-directors. Yes -- unfortunately, Jon McCarthy has retired as the Director of Shared User Facilities as of June 30th, 2014, leaving us in charge with big shoes to fill. During his last eight years, he brought together the loosely organized core facilities and helped to bring in multiple millions of dollars of critical instrumentation and equipment to keep UW Madison and the College of Engineering at the forefront of materials research and development.  We sincerely thank Jon for his dedication and years of service and wish him happiness and good luck  with his retirement! However, you are probably asking "Who are we?" We are Felix Lu and Erin Gill and we have been working closely with Jon since last summer. Felix Lu is currently an associate instrumentation innovator who was working with Jon on industrial outreach and also spends part of his time as a staff member at the Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronics.  Felix received his Ph.D. in electronic materials science from UC San Diego. He has worked at the Boeing Company on reliability studies of satellite electronics and photonics components, Duke University as a research scientist and co-founded a startup company in North Carolina (founded in 2006) that designs and manufactures high performance optical MEMS based devices for optical switching and related applications. Erin received her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from UW Madison and has a M.S. in physics. She has worked at a startup company in Indiana that develops customized intravital imaging solutions for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries and more recently in technology transfer at WiSys Technology Foundation. She is currently the administrative director of MRSEC.

We have a summer newsletter that has a lot of exciting (and hopefully useful!) information about events, features and perks offered through the university by being a member of the consortium. Please let us know how we are doing and if you would like to see the newsletter focus on a particular topic or topics.  

Funded with a $25 million commitment from The Grainger Foundation, the Grainger Institute for Engineering will foster new discoveries and build the university's global reputation as a leader in driving advances that help solve critical technological challenges. 

"The positive and transformative effects of this investment within the College of Engineering will resonate throughout the state and our nation far into the future," says UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank. "Through innovation in advanced manufacturing technologies and education of the workforce, the Institute will accelerate the renaissance of the U.S. manufacturing industry and enhance the nation's economy."
 [From http://www.news.wisc.edu/22930]

Figure 1. Azimuthally-integrated small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) pattern associated with the self-assembly of quaternary ammonium gemini surfactant in water (85.1 wt% surfactant), which spontaneously adopts a thermodynamically-driven bicontinuous cubic morphology known as the double gyroid. This data was obtained at 100 �C using the Rigaku SMAX-3000 High Brilliance SAXS Instrument located in the UW-Madison Materials Science Center, which enables characterization of the nanoscale morphologies of various materials having periodic structures in the range ~5-100 nm over a temperature range -196 to 300 �C. [Image Credit: G. P. Sorenson and M. K. Mahanthappa]

Brief description beyond the figure caption:

Lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) are self-assembled materials derived from the spontaneous, concentration-dependent self-assembly of surfactants in water into nanoperiodic structures exhibit well-defined aqueous and hydrophobic domains. Because of the molecular lengthscale associated with this supramolecular self-assembly process, LLC morphologies adopted by small molecule surfactant exhibit nanoscale periodicities at the 5-10 nm lengthscale. Bicontinuous cubic LLCs, comprising interpenetrating aqueous and hydrophobic domains that percolate over macroscopic distances, are of particular interest due to their potential utility in applications ranging from therapeutic delivery to templates for inorganic nanomaterials and new ion conducting polymer membranes.

Using the Rigaku SMAX-3000 High Brilliance small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) instrument housed in the UW-Madison Materials Science Center, the Mahanthappa Research group has discovered new classes of surfactants that favor the formation of useful bicontinuous cubic phases such as the double gyroid morphology. The Linkam hot stage associated with this SAXS instrument enables temperature-dependent SAXS analyses over the range -196 to 300 �C.

The Advanced Materials Industrial Consortium is scheduled to be on
Friday, September 26th, 2014. This event gives commercial partners additional avenues to collaborate with students and faculty in advanced materials research across the UW-Madison campus. The consortium facilitates interaction with university resources through a wide range of paths, including:

• Networking Opportunities
• Shared instrumentation
• Sponsored research and facilities use agreements
• become a visiting industrial researcher at UW-Madison
• Early access to student and postdoctoral researchers
• Annual meeting and shared instrument facilities open house
• Consulting opportunities

• Opportunities for input into research directions and planning via Member Feed back Session at the annual meeting
• Quarterly Newsletters with updated student, faculty and state of the art research; recent selected publications and highlights from the news. 
• Access to prospective student interns
• Invitation to an annual program review of research highlights presented by faculty, researchers, and students
• Access to shared instrumentation in university laboratories
• Collaboration by a visiting industrial fellow in residence in a UW-Madison laboratory. Details of the collaboration and residence period for hosted research may depend on the facility.

Featured presenters and topics will include:

• Prof. Mahesh Mahanthappa on New approaches to next generation ion transport membranes
• Prof. Martin Zanni on Carbon nanotube photovoltaics: Energy capture and flow studied with 2D White-Light spectroscopy
• Posters on nanoparticle toxicology (Hamers group)
• Posters from the interdisciplinary educational group on K-12 outreach educational activities
• Posters on state of the art research by MRSEC funded students and postdocs. 
• Dr. Tim Burland of Platypus technologies, on Liquid Crystal Sensors for Dosimetry and Rapid Sensing of Toxic Gases.
• Instrumentation talks by Cameca on the Atom Probe and sample preparation using the Focused Ion Beam (FIB).    

Isabella Slufarska

Materials Science Professor Isabella Slufarska and CBE Professor David Lynn were honored with  a Romnes faculty fellowships.  

Romnes awards recognize exceptional  faculty members who have earned tenur

e within the last six years. Selected by a Graduate School committee, winners receive an unrestricted $50,000

award for research, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The award is named for the late H. I. Romnes, former chairman of the board of AT&T and former president of the WARF Board of Trustees.   

Professor Slufarska is part of the Computational Materials Group (CMG) which uses uses atomic scale modeling to understand and design new materials. They employ highly accurate ab initio (first-principles) techniques to study electronic structure and energetics of smaller systems, and interatomic potential modeling on massively parallel computers to study up to hundreds of millions of atoms. These core approaches are combined with a wide-range of other atomistic metho

David Lynn

ds, including Monte Carlo, coarse graining, data mining, thermodynamics, and statistical physics. These tools allow deep and quantitative examination of materials phenomena over an extensive range of time and length scales.   

Professor Lynn  works on (i) the design and synthesis of functional organic materials and (ii) the fabrication and physical characterization of macromolecular assemblies, nanoscale materials, and interfaces, with particular interests in the design of functional polyelectrolytes, reactive polymers, and developing solutions to problems of biomedical and biotechnological importance. His research is conducted in a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative training environment that provides opportunities for students with backgrounds and interests in chemistry, engineering, biology, materials science, medicine, and the pharmaceutical sciences.  

Using a state-of-the-art microscope and new methods in image processing, a multi-institutional team of researchers has devised an inventive way to measure the positions of single atomic sites in materials more precisely than ever before.

In a paper published June 11, 2014, in the journal Nature Communications, the team demonstrated the ability to locate atoms in high-resolution images of materials to better than one picometer, or one-hundredth of a nanometer. That is more than five times better than previous imaging methods.  

A new certificate in sustainability will be available to undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison beginning this fall.

The Sustainability Certificate, offered through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies with support from the Office of Sustainability, will allow students to diversify their major course of study with interdisciplinary coursework in sustainability principles and application to real-world challenges.

The program culminates in a "Sustainability in Practice" capstone course that challenges students to work with peers and sustainability professionals to identify and address an existing issue on the UW-Madison campus, such as energy use, waste management, food systems, or transportation.

"Solving society's complex sustainability problems requires interdisciplinary teams. We will be drawing undergraduates from all across campus to learn together about sustainability principles and how to apply them by engaging in actual projects and activities on our campus," says Office of Sustainability co-director and chair of civil and environmental engineering Craig Benson. "This training will give our students a advantageous position in the job market with the breadth of employers who are looking for employees with unique knowledge and skills in sustainability."