Nicholas Kioussis, Physics Professor Awarded $2 Million NSF Grant to Study Nanotechnology

Three faculty members in Cal State Northridge's Department of Physics and Astronomy and a colleague from Princeton University have been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation that encourages CSUN undergraduates to work alongside Northridge and Princeton professors on cutting-edge research in the area of nanotechnology.

The grant, awarded to Northridge physics professors Nicholas Kioussis, Gang Lu, and Donna Sheng, and Princeton physics professor Emily Carter, will strengthen the research and educational activities of CSUN's multidisciplinary W.M. Keck Computational Materials Theory Center. It also will help establish a formal and long-term collaborative relationship between CSUN faculty and faculty at the Princeton Center for Complex Materials, a national leader in materials research.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for our students to get involved in and work on research not only with faculty here at Northridge, but also with faculty at Princeton University," Sheng said. "Hopefully, it will inspire them to continue their studies in materials science in graduate school, maybe even at Princeton. After all, they will have been working with Princeton faculty and the faculty will know their work."

Kioussis said that the joint research will have direct applications to future nanotechnology.

"This is frontier research using computer codes to understand how electrons interact with atoms on a nanoscale level," Kioussis said. In addition to doing research with faculty during the school year, six of the CSUN undergrads will be invited to continue their studies at Princeton each summer for nine weeks. "It will be a wonderful, hands-on experience for the student to do research at one of the nation's leading materials research centers," Kioussis said.