Foreword

A Message from the Director

As we work through the unprecedented challenges of the last two years, we continue to provide a stable research and innovation resource for our Mid-Atlantic nanotech community. This success is due in large part from the support provided by the University of Pennsylvania, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) program, and our network of engaged internal and external users. Together, we have worked through the pandemic to foster knowledge and pursue both fundamental and applied research during this era of uncertainty. I’m pleased to share the news that the NSF has renewed funding support of the Singh Center for Nanotechnology through the NNCI program for another five years. The funding will support the Center’s infrastructure research, development, and educational outreach opportunities through 2025. The funding also supports the Center’s commitment to continue our mission of providing resources to our external users for the advancement of nanoscience and nanotechnology. In order to meet the needs of our community, we’ve worked arduously to balance our achievable short-term goals during this period of uncertainty, while remaining focused on our long-term strategy of innovation and sustainability. We’ve looked deeply into our Center’s operations, in large part because of the urgent need to identify alternative training methods, and to provide tools and equipment to our users under new safety guidelines that help ensure safe collaboration. Although undertaken with the specific needs and constraints of the pandemic in mind, we believe that this journey will provide our Center with a tremendous number of new opportunities and efficiencies as we contemplate emerging into a post-pandemic era. Our Center has also continued its significant efforts in nanotechnology education and outreach, providing exposure, instruction and training opportunities to multiple constituencies, from K-12 students to our Graduate Student Fellows, (GSFs). These essential activities not only stimulate and engage student interest, but also provide much needed development opportunities in STEM fields. The short-term impacts of safe gathering guidelines have required us to reconfigure most of our outreach programs, including Nanoday and our Engineering Summer Academy at Penn, (ESAP) from in-person training to virtual interaction with limited disruption. It’s worthwhile to note that our staff members who managed the ESAP program created and shipped boxed experiment kits to each student form around the United States. These kits contained instruments and materials with 80 items (180 components, $400/package estimated value) so that the participants could experience 12 hands-on experiments and lab demonstrations to significantly augment their virtual interactions. A crucial component to our long-term operational strategy has been the engagement from members of the Singh Center for Nanotechnology Internal Advisory Board, an amalgamation of faculty researchers from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, (SEAS) and School of Art and Sciences, (SAS) who assist with developing strategies that bolster growth and provide feedback on the Center’s operations to ensure that the policies and procedures of the Center are well aligned to the needs of the faculty. We’ve been fortunate that our network of researchers are mobilizing to address the long-term solutions for the global implications of the future. The following examples of research investments showcase a collection of collaboration efforts to identify and address global issues that will be impactful in decades to come.

The Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture, (IoT4Ag), a new NSF-funded Engineering Research Center, (ERC) headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. The IoT4g Center, headed by the SEAS Associate Dean of Research and Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Cherie Kagan, will combine the talents of more than two dozen researchers from Penn Engineering, Purdue University, the University of California, Merced, and the University of Florida, to transform the future of agriculture by creating and translating to practice Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for precision agriculture. In addition to these technological advances, IoT4Ag will train and educate a diverse workforce that will address the societal grand challenge of food, energy and water security. An extension of the “Internet of Things” framework has also been the development of Nanoscale Internet-of-Things Research Community, a coalition of NNCI partners including, the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, (MANTH), the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, (CNF), the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor, (SENIC), the Nebraska Nanoscale Facility, (NNF), and the Kentucky Multiscale Manufacturing and Nanointegration Node (KY MMNIN). The purpose of this community is to exchange the work of NNCI users in the Nano-IoT research arena. The vision of this research community is that nanotechnology-enabled transducers will provide the input needed for data mining/big data processing so that we may understand complex system behavior. It is hoped that this community will catalyze the convergence of researchers from many intellectual backgrounds to establish advanced discoveries in nanoscience. A one-day symposium is scheduled for the fall. The Autonomous Systems for Materials Development Workshop, hosted in 2019 at the Singh Center by Materials Science and Engineering Professor Eric Stach. In this workshop, more than 30 participants from academia, government, and industry including participants from Google, IBM, Toyota Central R&D Laboratories, Dupont, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, DARPA, NIST, Air Force Research Laboratory, CCDC Army Research Laboratory gathered for three days to identify challenges and define the goals and pathways for future directions with autonomous systems for materials development. From this meeting stemmed ongoing discussions and a perspective article, “Autonomous Experimentation Systems for Materials Development: A Community Perspective,” published in July 2021, in the journal, Matter. As our Center continues to fulfill our commitment to research and academic excellence, we realize there will be unavoidable obstacles in our path that require reevaluating our strategies of engagement. I’m again gratified by the support, hard work, and achievements of our community of faculty and staff as we continue to overcome these obstacles. We hope that the information on the following pages provides insight to our community’s accomplishments as we look forward to another exciting year.

Sincerely,

Mark G. Allen Director, Singh Center for Nanotechnology University of Pennsylvania