Students from Alexey Ignatchenko’s chemistry class at St. John Fisher College got a firsthand introduction to a cleanroom during a recent visit to URnano. Specifically, they were shown lithographic processing on silicon substrates.

“The facility is state of the art,” said Ignatchenko, an assistant professor whose research interests include mechanisms of organic reactions on surfaces, computational modeling, and its application for catalytic and electrocatalytic processes.  “The visit was very helpful for students to get a different experience, otherwise not available to them at our college. All students have named the trip to URnano as their most valuable experience for the upper level undergraduate course ‘Advanced topics in chemistry.’”

Since its creation in 2011, URnano has assisted key University of Rochester and regional research interests, including development of biosensors, fuel cells, nanoscale filter membranes, and light emitters.

Applications range from GPS systems to detection of lethal biological warfare agents, and from portable dialysis devices to more efficient energy use.

Last year about 103 active users (including 18 outside users from 12 companies) logged 7,262 hours of machine time spread over 30 different machines.

URnano consists of a nearly 1,000-square-foot metrology (measurement) facility and a 2,000-square-foot cleanroom fabrication facility, featuring an array of electron microscopes, sputtering tools, etchers, and other equipment.  (Click here for a complete list.)

The total space occupied by the UR NanoSystems Center is divided into three distinct categories, each with its own specialized tooling.

Deposition and etch

Provides the capability to prepare surfaces for nanofabrication through cleaning and selective etching, including plasma processing and CVD activation.  Also provides stations for metal and oxide layering, using evaporation and sputtering techniques, and atomic layer deposition, as well as wet processing areas.

Lithography

Divided between a photolithographic area in the cleanroom and electron and ion beam processing in the metrology area.  The former contains a manual exposure tool for up to six inch substrates and associated bench processing; the latter, beam writing interfaces to state-of-the-art electron and ion beam tools. This total space provides capability to define features from the micro regime deep into the nanoregime.  The recent addition of a Microtech laserwriter facilitates fast wafer-scale CAD-based patterning as well.

Metrology

Tooling for high resolution imaging (SEM/TEM/STEM), compositional analysis (EDS, electron diffraction), and nano-machining with a focused gallium ion beam (FIB).  In addition, surface characterization is accomplished using scanning probe microscopies (LFM, AFM, STM, etc.), as well as a variety of spectroscopies.

By combining these three areas under one umbrella, URnano researchers are able to start with a design idea, fabricate prototypes and working models of devices and structures, and measure their progress.

Learn more here.

Though polls show the public is fed up with the US campaign finance system and supports reforms to restrict contributions and expenditures of political candidates and groups, there’s a disconnect between what large swaths of the public believe about campaign finance law, and the reality, suggest two researchers.

Addressing that disconnect is critical to policy making, according to David Primo, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor and associate professor of political science and business administration at Rochester, and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri.

Both are contributors to a national campaign finance report released in Washington at the Bipartisan Policy Center by an expert task force modeled on the 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

The report, Campaign Finance in the United States: Assessing an Era of Fundamental Change, examines the current state of the US campaign finance system and its implications for future elections. In its executive summary, the report concludes that over the last 15 years the system has changed dramatically in terms of law, politics, and technology, making it “almost unrecognizable to participants in the 1970s system” when the modern campaign finance system was born.

As part of their work on the task force, Primo and Milyo conducted two national surveys in 2015 and 2016 to assess the public’s views on campaign finance, how concerned the public is about the role money plays in the political system, and what—if anything—should be done about it. These surveys, discussed in the report and in a companion paper, form the basis for their book project Campaign Finance and American Democracy: What the Public Really Thinks and Why It Matters.

They found that even as the public supports campaign finance reform, many are misinformed about key aspects of campaign finance law. That’s not surprising, they argue, considering the complexity of the law. Moreover, they found that large shares of the public, already mistrustful of the political system, are skeptical that reform would have a meaningful impact on the workings of American democracy.

Milyo and Primo’s research forms the basis for the report’s assessment that political scientists should “shoulder some of the blame” for the public’s and the media’s apparent misunderstanding of basic facts about campaign financing: “We have failed in many cases to bring to light the data and analysis that preoccupy experts in the field,” the report finds.

Read more here.

Eleven older adults (age 55+) recently convened in a computer lab at LeChase Hall to work on a key part of their class research project, their literature reviews.

They were brought together through a new program called Engaging Older Adult Learners as Health Researchers (ENGOAL). 

The program helps older adults to become educated consumers of research and to partner with geriatrics researchers in developing community relevant research questions. The program also helps to develop participants’ health literacy, enabling them to advocate for themselves and members of their communities.

The ENGOAL team  — Sandhya Seshadri and Craig Sellers from the School of Nursing, Silvia Sörensen and Joyce Duckles from the Warner School, Doreen Young from the Beechwood Greenhouse Collaborative, George Moses from North East Area Development, Phyllis Jackson from Common Ground Health, and several Warner graduate students — also hopes to increase older adults’ engagement in their health care and foster their interactions with health professionals as patients, advocates, and co-researchers.

The seniors divided into three teams and are now focusing their research efforts on health issues affecting African American older adults, including: mental health, depression, and stress; diabetes and chronic diseases and the lack of communication between doctors and patients; and educating African American families on symptoms, types, and management of dementia.

A two-year Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Engagement Award to the Warner School in 2017 has allowed University researchers to collaborate with the School of Nursing to educate and train the older adults from urban Rochester on geriatric health and health research methods. Read more here about how participation in the ENGOAL program has impacted these local seniors personally—both in the relationships that they have formed here and in their endeavors to advocate for themselves and others.

Ching Tang, emeritus professor of chemical engineering, who has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for helping to pioneer the organic light-emitting diode, or OLED. Used in flat panel displays found in computers, cell phones, and televisions, OLEDs “provide increased power efficiency, longer battery life, and improved display quality,” the Hall of Fame notes.

Aaron Steven White has joined the Department of Linguistics as an assistant professor after a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University’s Science of Learning Institute, where he also held affiliations in the Department of Cognitive Science and the Center for Language and Speech Processing. As a computational semanticist, White studies the relationship between concepts and the words and linguistic structures that are used to refer to them. In prior work, he investigated how knowledge of that relationship undergirds children’s ability to learn the words of their language. His current work focuses primarily on combining classic logic-based approaches to semantics with modern machine-learning methods in order to construct theoretically motivated models that are designed to synthesize multiple data sources. With his collaborators at Johns Hopkins, he is investigating how the models can be deployed as modular components of a system for rapid knowledge base construction from multimodal sources, including images, audio, and raw text. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland.

Learn how to manage your scholarly identity and boost your research impact. Learn time-saving strategies and get an introduction to the tools the University has in place to connect you with colleagues, discover collaborators, manage research data, find funders, and expose your work to new audiences.

These will be the topics addressed from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., January 30 by the 2017-2018 Professional Development Workshop Series for the Next Generation of Faculty.

The interactive workshop, featuring Lauren Di Monte, data research impact librarian; Stephanie Barrett, interdisciplinary social sciences librarian; and Moriana Garcia, science and engineering outreach librarian, will be at the Feldman Ballroom.

Lunch will be provided.  RSVP here. Contact Adele Coelho, faculty outreach coordinator, with questions or for accommodations.

Pilot and feasibility awards of up to $50,000 are available for basic science and translational projects that advance our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, through the Rochester Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, in conjunction with the Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience.

The awards enable new and established investigators to generate preliminary data that will lead to competitive applications for extramural funding.

Applications are due on Monday, March 5.

Click here for additional information and the RFA.

Peter Joseph Bryk, Microbiology & Immunology, “Investigation into the roles of vaccinia virus protein F13 and its molluscum contagiosum virus homolog MC021.” Noon, January 26, 2018. Medical Center Upper Aud 3-7619.

Kin Ho Lo, Physics, “Search for Supersymmetry in p-p collisions at √s=13 TeV using the αT variable with the CMS detector.” 1 p.m., January 30, 2018. 372 Bausch and Lomb. Advisor: Aran Garcia-Bellido.

Jan. 30: Understanding Research Impact. Part of the Professional Development Workshop Series for the Next Generation of Faculty, featuring Lauren Di Monte, data research impact librarian; Stephanie Barrett, interdisciplinary social sciences librarian; and Moriana Garcia, science and engineering outreach librarian. 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., Feldman Ballroom. Lunch will be provided.  RSVP here. Contact Adele Coelho, faculty outreach coordinator, with questions or for accommodations.

Jan. 31: Deadline to apply for Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) awards to promote research collaboration between faculty, staff, and students from the University and from Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI). For further information, contact Timothy Dye or Ivelisse Rivera. Read more here.

Jan. 31: Deadline to enter the fifth annual America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent Student Competition,  in which students from across the University compete for a chance to present their regulatory science ideas at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additional information, an entry form, and instructions on how to apply are on the America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent web page. Submit entry forms to Scott Steele by January 31, 2018.

Feb. 1: Deadline to submit initial abstracts for Public Health Science (PHS) pilot projects to stimulate new collaborations with PHS faculty. Proposals are being solicited that support collaborative relationships between investigators who do not have a recent history (past 3 years) of joint funding or who want to expand their current collaborative efforts in new directions and for whom the pilot project would be catalytic in their effort to obtain extramural funding. More information can be found at the PHS website.

Feb. 2: Deadline to register for seven-week training program for University researchers and community members in community-engaged research. Contact Indrani Singh at indrani_singh@urmc.rochester.edu with questions or class details.

Feb. 8: “Deserts, Dust, and Iron Fertilization of the North Pacific Ocean: Cause or Consequence of Global Cooling?” Presented by Carmala Garzione, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Feldman Ballroom, Frederick Douglass Commons. Click here to register.

Feb 23: Deadline to apply for University Research Awards. The Request for Proposals and application are available here. Completed applications should be directed to adele.coelho@rochester.edu.

Feb. 23: Deadline to apply for AS&E PumpPrimer II Awards, which provide seed money to stimulate extramural funding for innovative and high-risk projects otherwise difficult to launch. Faculty in Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in Engineering to Cindy Gary.

March 1: “Doing Better Next Time: Policy Lessons from the Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery.” Presented by Narayana Kocherlakota, Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.

March 5: Applications due for pilot and feasibility awards of up to $50,000 for basic science and translational projects that advance our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, through the Rochester Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, in conjunction with the Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience. Click here for additional information and RFA.

April 12: “The American Health Paradox: What’s Missing?” Presented by Nancy Bennett, professor of medicine and public health sciences, director of the Center for Community Health, and co-director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Helen Wood Hall. Click here to register.