The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech has announced the winners for the 2021 Spring Facility Seed Grants. The primary purpose of this program is to give first- or second-year graduate students in diverse disciplines working on original and un-funded research in micro- and nano-scale projects the opportunity to access the most advanced academic cleanroom space in the Southeast. In addition to accessing the high-level fabrication, lithography, and characterization tools in the labs, the awardees will have the opportunity to gain proficiency in cleanroom and tool methodology and access the consultation services provided by research staff members of the IEN.  Seed Grant awardees are also provided travel support to present their research at a scientific conference.

In addition to student research skill development, this bi-annual grant program gives faculty with novel research topics the ability to develop preliminary data to pursue follow-up funding sources. The Facility Seed Grant program is supported by the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC), a member of the National Science Foundation’s National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI).

Since the start of the grant program in 2014,  sixty-eight projects  from ten different schools in Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Engineering and Science, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and 3 other universities, have been seeded.

The 3 winning projects in this round were awarded IEN cleanroom and lab access time to be used over the next year. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in biodevice development, new methodologies for tissue imaging, and design of water filtration membranes.

The Spring 2021 IEN Facility Seed Grant Award winners are:

Development of Lab-on-a-Chip Platform to Study the Extracellular Electron Transfer Processes
Student: Mourin Jarin | PI: Xing Xie
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Correlative 3D Metabolic and Structural In Situ Imaging of Human Tissues
Student: Thomas Hu (ECE) | PI: Ahmet Coskun
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Machine Learning-Assisted Design of Sustainable Nanofiltration Membranes for Wastewater Resource Recovery
Student: Dylan Lambeth | PI: Yongsheng Chen
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

- Christa M. Ernst

The Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), is funded by NSF Grant ECCS-2025462