The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $200,000 collaborative university education grant to Sinclair Community College and the University of Dayton in January. Only five months into the two-year grant, that investment has yielded a number of new educational modules in nanotechnology, the study of manipulating matter at the atomic level.
This Fall Semester, Sinclair, the University of Dayton and Dayton-area high schools will each be offering two new nanotechnology courses developed under the NSF grant by Surinder Jain, coordinator of Sinclair’s Engineering University Transfer program, and Andrew Sarangan, associate director of the University of Dayton electro-optics graduate program.
High school students will be able to build upon the modules if they matriculate to Sinclair, and Sinclair students who transfer to the University of Dayton for their bachelor’s degree will be able to take their nanotechnology credits into the program. The Dayton Regional STEM Center and local nanotechnology businesses will help guide the workforce development taking place in the new education pipeline.
“We’re trying to educate from high schools, to two-year colleges, to universities, so we’re starting from grass roots,” said Jamshid Moradmand, an associate professor of Engineering Technology at Sinclair and one of the project’s organizers.
Moradmand is working on a Ph.D. dissertation on nanotechnology and said that the idea for the project came from discussions he had with nanotech faculty about how difficult it was to find students that are educated and interested in the field.
“Students should know what the latest technology is,” said Jain. “Nanotechnology is a big and upcoming field, and there are quite a few companies in Dayton now that are starting nanotechnology manufacturing and fabrication.”
Nanotechnology is the basis for many technological developments, from the cutting edge to the mundane. It is used both in stain-proof pants and in the latest advances in computer and military hardware.
“People use these things daily without knowing what sort of nanotechnology is already in there,” said Joseph Haus, director of the University of Dayton electro-optics graduate program. “We thought it would be of great interest to bring this kind of information to undergraduate students and get them thinking about how it might play a role in their future.”
One recent nanotech development is graphene, a carbon compound that can be stretched into layers one hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Graphene has applications that range from advanced circuits to room-temperature distillation.
“Nanotechnology is going to touch every aspect of life in the coming years,” Jain said.
To manipulate materials at a sub-atomic scale, nanotechnology researchers use high-powered scanning electron microscopes. The nanotechnology program will allow students across many institutions to learn from the scanning electron microscope at the University of Dayton. Using high definition cameras, Jain and his team will broadcast video from the microscope to students across the Dayton area.
“Most colleges can’t afford $2-3 million scanning electron microscopes,” said Jain. “You could be sitting at home, and if you are a student in one of the courses, you could attend a webinar at your home, or you could have it here in one of our labs, so this could be anywhere in the world.”
This Remote Nano Demo System will allow two-way audio communication between the demonstrators and students, and is one of several innovations that won Sinclair and the University of Dayton the NSF grant.
In order to work with nanotechnology, laboratories require clean rooms and astronaut-like gear to prevent contamination, and clean rooms can’t accommodate enough people to be viable venues for teaching large groups of undergraduates about nanotechnology. To overcome this obstacle, Dr. Nick Reeder, professor of electronic engineering technology at Sinclair, is developing software that will simulate the type of interface that students would encounter in a nanotechnology laboratory.
“The typical nano-fab facility has millions of dollars of equipment…but it’s a restrictive environment,” said Reeder. “This will let people specify, for example, a layer of aluminum, the pressure or power of the instrument, and it will do the calculations and give them a visual representation of what the [finished product] would look like.”
The Nano-fab Simulator will be ready for use in the Fall Semester courses at the University of Dayton and Sinclair, and the designers hope that it will also be available for training high school teachers this summer.
“We’re going at a very fast speed, because what we really want to do is, within the grant period of two years, we want to develop everything and then test everything out and tweak everything.”
Then, the group will apply for a bigger grant to continue the program, said Jain. Eventually, the courses will be part of a short-term technical certificate program at Sinclair.
“Every university in the nation is trying to do nanotechnology…but ours is very unique,” said Jain.
Jain said that the program would lay an educational foundation that nanotechnology companies will be able to build upon quickly and easily.
“What I really like about this program is we get a chance to work with Sinclair…and also to try to make a connection to high school teachers,” said Haus. “This is trying to get into the pipeline and get this information to a lot of students who will be coming up and thinking about careers in engineering or science in the future.”
Students interested in the new nanotechnology program at Sinclair can contact the office of Science, Mathematics and Engineering at 512-2918.