Enhanced Infrastructure for Research and Education
The strength of a multi-institutional NSF grant is in harvesting the collective proven techniques and experiences of all institutional partners and creating new approaches towards STEM education. Along these lines, the proposed RINGS collaboration will enforce the interaction between student peers and faculty coming from two different academic environments (liberal arts colleges and professional engineering schools); thus, inter-twining an engineering culture with a liberal arts culture. Moreover, the RINGS platform will guide the engineering education practices that Wesleyan will be incorporating in the upcoming College of Engineering and Design that will be established in the coming academic year.
Graduate and Undergraduate Education
Our educational vision is driven by our wish to produce professionals that are fully prepared to drive the advancement of wireless communications and wavefront shaping applications. We will work together to accomplish this goal by giving our students training in modeling and metamaterial design, wireless communications, and device fabrication and characterization. Picture a student designing and fabricating a structure, observing for the first time novel wavefront shaping phenomena, and comparing theoretical predictions with experimental realities. Clearly, this is an approach with tantalizing possibilities to bring the subject of microwave meta-surfaces and wireless communications alive in a beautiful way. These skills
will immediately play a major part of the Honors thesis of the two undergraduate and the PhD thesis of the three graduate students involved in this project. We will prepare our students through our “research work group”, where for one hour every two weeks via Zoom conference, students from all three institutions will have the opportunity to develop research and presentation skills by giving seminars on their progress which will be carefully critiqued by the entire team, including faculty. Given how complex the world has become, their ability to deal with communication and collaboration issues will play a vital role in their future career. We have also incorporated a travel budget that will allow our students to spend time at each of the other institutions. For example, a student at Wesleyan University might spend two weeks during the year at UCSD learning about system design and two weeks at UMD where she/he will be collecting data from characterization and bringing them back to Wesleyan for theoretical discussion. We expect that such graduate and undergraduate involvement will act as a springboard for future engineering careers.
Diversity
The team is committed to advancing underrepresented groups in STEM careers. For example, Dan Sievenpiper has a research group consisting of more than 50% of PhD students coming from under-represented groups. Steve Anlage’s group recently has had an African-American graduate student, two female post-docs, and three female graduate students. Anlage trained two of these female Ph.D. students with a NSF grant (NSF ECCS-1158644). Tsampikos Kottos has graduated three female students and has recently hired a female post-doctoral associate. The team plans to apply for a post-award supplement which will allow us to host instructional faculty and undergraduate students from minority serving institutions, to participate in an RINGS Faculty and Undergraduate Fellows Summer Research Program. To broaden participation, we will leverage existing outreach programs at our institutions to develop new opportunities for education of underrepresented groups. For example, the PI (?) has been already involved in “The Physics Summer Outreach Program for Middle School Girls” which aims to introduce these students to science.
Outreach
The team is very active in outreach through the organization of conferences, workshops and K12 education. Anlage has participated in high school science class visits and ‘Physics is Phun’ demonstration shows supported by the UMD Lecture Demonstration facility. Kottos has co-organized various international conferences and workshops on aspects of wave-transport in complex media, and he is active in K12 education via lectures at local high-schools, and offering Advanced Research Mentorship Classes and internships to high-school students. Sievenpiper was the general chair of the URSI Radio-Science meeting which was held at San Diego in 2017 while he was serving for several years as chair of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Administrative Committee on New Technology Directions. All PIs have encouraged and supported the participation of younger scientists and students in various technical meetings and workshops. During the last year of the RINGS, we will organize a one-day symposium at UMD on “Wavefront Shaping and RIS”. This will allow us to establish a broader collaborative research group in the wireless communications community. Anlage and Kottos has already organized successfully, 3 years ago such a meeting with more than 20 participants from all over the country at UMD.
Links with Industry
We will welcome interactions with the industry partners listed in this solicitation in order to commercialize the products of our effort. We have a documented history in transformative research and working in close contact with industrial partners. For example, the Sievenpiper has more than 70 issued patents while UCSD and UMD have established Offices of Technology Commercialization that can assist in further co-development after the program is over.