IGERT Home
The Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program is focused on a highly interdisciplinary area of materials research that is central to advances in many areas of science and technology — Nanoscale Control of Surfaces and Interfaces. A large fraction of today’s research involves nanoscale control of materials in one form or another. At Cornell for example, physicists are trying to understand the properties of nanoscale structures, chemists are trying to control nanoscale self-assembly, materials scientists are trying to make nanostructured materials, and engineers are trying to construct new nanoscale electronic and spintronic devices. Although these projects are connected by their emphasis on small length scales, there is a much deeper scientific connection: the surfaces and interfaces that define the nanostructures strongly influence — and sometimes dominate — their behavior. The control of surfaces and interfaces is therefore crucial to further advances. In addition to this scientific connection, there is also a technical connection, as the analysis and study of nanostructured materials relies heavily on the specialized analytical, computational and theoretical tools originally developed for the study of surfaces and interfaces.
IGERT Fellows and faculty represent seven different graduate fields on the Cornell campus:
- Applied and Engineering Physics
- Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
- Chemistry and Chemical Biology
- Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Materials Science and Engineering
- Physics
- Theoretical and Applied Mathematics
