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| Gopalan receives NSF CAREER award | |
Padma Gopalan |
Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Padma Gopalan has received the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER). The awards are granted on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education.
Gopalan will receive a $445,000, five-year grant for research, education and outreach on nanostructured polymer composites with electroactive molecular subunits. Nanostructured materials are a unique class of materials with wide-ranging applications in drug-delivery systems, nanoelectronics, electro-optics, and photonic band-gap materials. Gopalan's work investigates the structure-property relationship in electro-optic materials, which can control the speed of light through electric-field-induced changes in their index of refraction. Electro-optical materials are important to applications such as fiber-optic data transmission, analog video transmission, and millimeter wave signal generation.
Electro-optic polymers offer unique possibilities for complete opto-electronic integration and efficient, flexible, active optical devices. Electro-optic activity is enabled through blending a non-linear optical chromophore with a polymer host, and applying an electric poling field to impose orientational order on the dipolar chromophores. Although such polymers can be made today, there is little fundamental understanding of the interface between the chromophore and polymer host. Gopalan has proposed a systematic approach to controlling the morphology of the material through chemical design and correlating the morphology to observed activity. These studies will provide basic information on rational design of next-generation electro-optic materials.
As part of the project, Gopalan will create an educational and outreach program that will incorporate her work into the undergraduate instructional laboratories, including creating a polymer course in the department with a major emphasis on nanostructured electronic polymers. This course will educate materials engineers on the chemical design aspects of a polymeric material and the correlation between structure and observed properties. An extended outreach program will be aimed at female high-school students and minority colleges, including improved materials-science training of high-school students and teachers, and mentoring female graduate and undergraduate students. An industry outreach effort will include educating materials engineers on the chemistry of polymeric materials and broader dissemination of research on nanostructured materials.
Gopalan received her PhD in chemistry from Cornell University in 2001. She also served as a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 2001-2003. She joined the college's faculty in 2003.
Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu
Date last modified: Tuesday, 26-Apr-2005 17:06:42 CDT
Date created: 26-Apr-2005
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