(86b) Ongoing 12-Year Long Research Experiences for Undergraduates On Novel Advanced Materials and Processing

The goal is a stronger and diverse U.S. workforce of scientists, engineers, and technologists as well as discovery across the frontier of science and engineering.  This requires significant efforts to attract and prepare U.S. students to be highly qualified members in the global technical workforce, to support innovative research thereby enabling people at the forefront of discovery to make important and significant contributions to science and engineering knowledge, and to increase opportunities for underrepresented individuals to conduct high quality, competitive research activities.

Objectives of our ongoing Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site for 12 straight years include development and enhancement of the students' creativity and ethics in science and engineering, safety training in research laboratories, fostering the understanding of the research process and intellectual property, giving the students experience at writing and presenting their work, and uniquely preparing them for interdisciplinary collaborations in their future careers.  Our REU program has already included a total of over 120 undergraduates from the U.S. with a wide spectrum of scientific backgrounds.

Outcomes, benefits and deliverables of our REU program included professional training on safety in the laboratory along with certificates of laboratory safety and waste management, tutorials on making oral presentations and writing technical papers, one-on-one interactions of the REU students with faculty and graduate students from several disciplines in an exciting scientific environment in novel research in emerging technologies and cutting-edge research, literature study on their research topic, hands on experimentation or modeling, weekly presentations on motivation, objective, status, and future planning of research, intermediate and final reports on research, visits of other research labs in the area,  acquired confidence in working independently, application of the students’ own ideas to state-of-the-art  research, planning and carrying out experiments in laboratories, submission of final reports/papers to the Journal of Undergraduate Research (JUR) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (http://jur.phy.uic.edu/ ) that are anonymously reviewed by faculty, and submission of additional research manuscripts to other refereed journals.

  Another important unique aspect of the REU Program was the continuous and intense cross-fertilization of ideas among undergraduates with very rich and diverse (academic, cultural, socioeconomic) backgrounds.