This IGERT project couples research activities at three colleges of The City University of New York (CUNY) with those of collaborators at Columbia University and The University of Rochester in several unique focus areas of nanotechnology. The participating colleges from CUNY are The City College, Hunter College and The College of Staten Island. An important goal for this project is to enhance the research activities and pedagogy for participant graduate students, the majority from underrepresented groups, with the anticipated outcome of attracting more students into the nanotechnology field and retaining them to completion of their Ph.D. degrees.

The overall mission is to educate and train students in an interdisciplinary environment whereby a graduate student may participate in all the facets of a research project: synthesis, materials fabrication, characterization, etc. Students are not just sources of samples or instrument technicians. A slogan that we believe captures the style of our collaborative involvement of students is "We send students, not just samples!"

This project provides for the creation of a steady-state population of graduate students at CUNY institutions who will participate in a program of enrichment activities and research during the first year. Upon completion of their first year, a cohort of students will be recruited and matriculated into the graduate schools of Columbia or Rochester, where they will begin their Ph.D. research projects and be financially supported for an additional year with IGERT funds; subsequent support would be provided by funds available to the chosen mentor. The remaining students may pursue their Ph.D. degree as CUNY students.

The mechanism that leads to mentor identification involves, in the first semester of matriculation, a laboratory rotation in which students are required to spend a day in each of the laboratories involved in the IGERT effort. This is in order to have a broader overview of the theme; through exposure to IGERT faculty and fellow IGERT students in their own research environment, so as to learn about the laboratory's research and instrumentation. For the period between semesters (i.e., the intersession), the students would spend two weeks in any of two of the collaborating CUNY laboratories. And in the summer after the first year, they would be rotated between Columbia University and The University of Rochester. During these periods of general rotations the students are expected to acclimatize to the uniqueness of the project, develop a broader knowledge of the IGERT faculty members and their research and develop relationships with peers. In the third semester, students are to decide which IGERT PI to work with and under which collaborative effort. Our estimations suggest that ~25% of the students will matriculate to Rochester and Columbia each year and the total graduate student population participating in the IGERT after 4 years is expected to be near 40.

Students who remain in the CUNY doctoral program will be matriculated into a new Ph.D. sub-discipline degree program entitled "Nanotechnology and Materials Chemistry." This new program at CUNY (just approved for the Fall semester of the 2000-2001 academic year, and possibly the first in the country) is a spin-off of the IGERT award. Enhancements through this mechanism include a new credit-bearing course in nanotechnology; laboratory rotations within CUNY aimed at teaching basic laboratory techniques for research in nanotechnology and materials chemistry; and an advanced seminar course focused on nanotechnology. This latter course will include live multi-campus teleconferenced seminars utilizing distance-learning facilities and an end-of-semester student seminar program that provides students with the necessary experiences for developing and delivering formal scientific talks on specified topics as well as their research.

The IGERT project affords students with numerous research opportunities, each one truly interdisciplinary in nature. It should be noted that each PI has different research projects under different research thrusts; thus, each PI has several collaborations with other PIs and with industrial and government laboratory colleagues.