Materials: the Next Generation

When today's chemistry graduate students go out into the world, they're as likely to rub shoulders with physicists and engineers as they are with their own peers--particularly if they're called on to use their organic or inorganic synthetic skills to create materials or nanodevices.

What better way to prepare future materials scientists than to immerse them in a real materials lab environment? To that end, a group of University of California, Los Angeles, professors has developed the Materials Creation Training Program (MCTP), a two-year interdisciplinary program to supplement a student's regular graduate work.

Competition for admission to the program is stiff: Only eight to 12 graduate students in physics, chemistry, and engineering are accepted each year. Professors give these students a healthy dose of synthetic chemistry, device physics, and device design. MCTP students cut their teeth on nanocrystals, polymer light-emitting diodes, gas sensors, and high-temperature superconductors. They synthesize opals, which make good photonic band gap materials. "It's something that has a high fun value and a lot of good physics," UCLA chemistry professor Sarah Tolbert says. The students "get a lot of insight into what materials chemistry is all about."

Working with those who have different academic backgrounds, the students learn to bridge their respective "language" barriers. They attend lectures, design their own experiments, and even receive a small amount of funding to buy supplies and materials. They attend regular seminars on topics ranging from ethics to entrepreneurship.

"This is not stuff you'd ordinarily do if you were a regular organic chemistry student," says Brian H. Northrop, a third-year chemistry graduate student at UCLA and an MCTP participant.

Now in its fourth year, MCTP is one of three National Science Foundation-funded Integrative Graduate Education & Research Traineeships (IGERT) at UCLA. The idea for MCTP flowed from a group of faculty involved with UCLA's Exotic Materials Institute.

Chemistry and biochemistry and materials science professor Fred Wudl directs MCTP, and principal investigators include Tolbert, chemistry professors Robin L. Garrell and Kendall N. Houk, chemistry and biochemistry and materials science professor Richard B. Kaner, materials science and engineering professor Bruce S. Dunn, physics professor George Grüner, mechanical engineering professor Chang-Jin Kim, and 18 other UCLA faculty members.

At the program's core is a materials laboratory class. Working in teams, MCTP students select four lab experiments from a choice of seven or eight and also design their own final experiment. If the student-designed experiments are really cool--like making transparent conducting films out of single-walled carbon nanotubes--they'll be used in the following year's lab class, Wudl says.

Finally, students are required to do internships in industry. Northrop says this is a valuable experience that offers students the chance "to leave the academic world to see what national labs or R&D firms do."

MCTP has caught the eye of other departments on campus as well as of other universities, and it is now working on potential collaborations and possibilities for expanding the program.

The scientific community is awaiting this next generation of materials scientists. "At the age of 24 or 25, MCTP participants have hands-on experience making materials," Garrell says. "Students graduating [from the program] are poised to make important contributions outside of the traditional or mainstream area."