SCSU, Yale Team Up

A grant from the National Science Foundation will extend and expand a partnership between Yale and Southern Connecticut State University to study newfangled materials — and explain them to New Haven teachers and students.

The $13.9 million grant, announced late last week, cements Yale as the host of only a handful of these types of centers for materials science. It also offers an opportunity for Southern, which is building its science and math programs, to establish itself as the go-to spot for students interested in emerging technologies.

Southern will get about $1.8 million through the six-year grant — the largest amount ever received for research at the university. The rest goes to Yale. The latest round of funding builds on a 2005 grant, worth $7.5 million, that established the Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena, or CRISP. 

One factor in scoring the highly competitive grant was the collaboration between the two schools, said Christine C. Broadbridge (at right in the picture above), chair of Southern’s physics department and the director of education for CRISP. The joint effort is a somewhat rare event, even though the two schools are only a few miles apart.

“This is a true partnership,” she said.

Charles H. Ahn (at left in the picture above), CRISP’s director and a Yale professor of physics, mechanical engineering and materials science, agreed, calling the collaboration ​“very vibrant.”

“It’s more than the sum of its parts,” he said.

One of the big things the NSF is pushing, he said, is research and discussions that cross disciplines — bringing engineers and medical researchers together, for example. Those collaborations were possible before, Ahn said, but didn’t happen organically all that often.

Now they do, and the results include not just the strong relationship with Southern, but cooperation with researchers from all over the country, who sometimes come to New Haven to use Yale’s equipment.

The ​“core functions” of the center are basic: scientific research, and education and outreach. With the renewal, the center will expand from one area of research focus to two. Since its inception, CRISP has concentrated on oxide structures engineered at the atomic scale, exploring how oxidation affects different substances when they’re put together, and what those reactions can do.

Moving forward, the oxide focus will lean more toward designing new types of these oxide interfaces, as well as finding applications for them. These materials are useful in electronics, communications and sensors, said Eric I. Altman, a Yale chemical and environmental engineering professor and the co-leader of the CRISP oxides group.

The new second group will explore the potential of metallic glasses, which show great promise as a way to have the light weight and small size of plastics with the resilience and durability of metal.

The NSF grant will buy new equipment and fund additional positions, mostly for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, Ahn said. 

While Yale faculty and students are and will remain involved in the educational component of the CRISP initiative, Broadbridge is inarguably its leader. She and Richard Therrien (pictured), the K‑12 science supervisor for New Haven Public Schools, have a longstanding relationship. The new NSF money will narrow the project’s focus from the region to just city schools.

In practice, much of the focus will be on training teachers, Therrien said. Some have already participated in Saturday or summer classes that cover subjects such as nanotechnology or other newer fields in physics or engineering. Other parts of the program involve professors and graduate students visiting classrooms, or mentoring NHPS students for the city’s science fair.

While the CRISP research is at a very high level, the concepts for teachers and students are much simpler. Instead of talking about metal oxides, for example, teachers might take apart a disk drive in class, to show how the components come together, or use ethical and safety questions about nanotechnology to bolster a lesson on the scientific method.

“It’s really themes about core science concepts,” Broadbridge said. It’s teaching science with a context.”

Another thrust is getting students and teachers involved in hands-on scientific research, as a way to both help them learn and energize them about science and math. The idea is to go well beyond the periodic table or the law of gravity, and into concepts that might motivate students to pursue upper-level degrees and jobs in the technology sector.

“We have to move past, in high school science, the answer to the question ​‘why do I have to learn this?’ being ’ because you’re going to need it next year,’” Therrien said. ​“The answer now is, ​‘here’s how it’s used in the world.’”

Therrien said the city school system’s approach to science teaching is changing: in today’s world, biology, chemistry and physics don’t exist in a vacuum. So teachers and administrators are working to teach students in a way that reflects the overlaps between subjects.

The CRISP project also plays into the citywide school reform effort, which emphasizes teacher performance. Broadbridge said a priority is developing a way to understand what teachers trained at Southern are bringing to their classrooms.

“I really want to measure the impact that we do have on these teachers,” Broadbridge said.

Southern’s participation in CRISP dovetails with existing efforts to build in the area of materials science, particularly nanotechnology. The school is the home base for the state university system’s Center for Nanotechnology. A $750,000 grant from the U. S. Dept. of Energy is already paying for new equipment. Southern has a four-course graduate certificate program in nanotechnology, which began this summer.

In the past few years, the number of physics majors at Southern has more than doubled, to 100, Broadbridge said. She can also trace a number of undergraduate students who’ve gone on to advanced degrees or jobs in these areas in the six years since CRISP’s founding.

While Yale is more focused on research than development, Ahn said CRISP has strong ties with many companies, including IBM, and works with any business in Connecticut that wants help. The center also partners with the Brookhaven and Argonne national laboratories.

“We create a pipeline,” he said.

The flow of innovation should only become stronger now that the additional money has come through. Ahn said he expects the pace of the CRISP researchers to accelerate over the next couple of years, as the work that’s already been done starts to build on itself.

“We have a machine which is running,” he said.