Manhattan High School Student Explores Growing Nanowires

    Zach Culbertson, a junior at Manhattan High School in Manhattan KS, enjoys learning about science research.  At school, he participates in the Science Olympiad, Scholars Bowl, Quest, FRC Robotics Club, Tennis, and Fencing.  He also enjoys studying Arabic, the Middle East and Politics.
    As part of a class assignment, Zach was asked to explore his career interests and select someone in that position of interest to interview. He knew he enjoyed science, engineering and “hands-on research." In addition, he knew "practical lab experience is very useful in any science career,” so, Zach decided to investigate a career in physics and to interview Dr. Bret Flanders, Associate Professor of Physics at Kansas State University and a member of the Kansas NSF EPSCoR Track 2 Collaborative Research: Imaging and Controlling Ultrafast Dynamics of Atoms, Molecules and Nanostructures research team.  It was during this interview that Dr. Flanders saw great potential in Zach and offered him an afterschool internship opportunity to work in his lab.
    The focus of Dr. Flanders’ research is making electrodes for the creation of nanowires to be used for experiments involving electronic transfer.  Zach is responsible for constructing and thinning electrodes so that “we can ‘grow’ nanowires” on the tips of the electrodes by sending an electrical current through a solution containing the unique materials needed to create them.

Above are illustrations of methods used for growing nanowires.

    Zach said his lab task is to grow nanowires that can be used to study electronic transfers that will “help increase the speed and efficiency of the electronic devices.”  He stated that the best part of the internship experience is seeing the practical use and impact of what he has learned in his high school science classes.  Zach added that this internship has given him “lots of practical laboratory experience related to lab procedures and practices" as well as an opportunity to better prepare him for whatever kind of science career he chooses to pursue.
    As for his future plans, Zach said, “I would like to attend college, hopefully Harvard, and am looking at going into Aerospace Engineering or Biomedical Engineering, and Middle Eastern Studies. I would also like to try to get involved with the World Food Program as a volunteer.”

The Flanders Group works in the areas of soft matter nanotechnology and biological physics.  Current projects focus on measuring the distribution of cell-electrode residence times as a function electrode-voltage.

Education and outreach funding for this high school internship opportunity is provided by the Kansas and Nebraska NSF EPSCoR Track 2 Grant #1430519 titled: "Imaging and Controlling Ultrafast Dynamics of Atoms, Molecules, and Nanostructures."  The grant's educational objectives are designed to enhance STEM education in Kansas by supporting activities that will lead to an expanded STEM workforce or prepare a new generation for STEM careers in the areas of atomic/molecular/optical science.

Emporia State Partners with AVID Climate Initiative to Explore Aerosols

     Dr. C. Matt Seimears, Chair and Associate Professor of the Education/Early Childhood/Special Education Department at Emporia State University was awarded a Kansas NSF Education and Diversity award to develop four spring 2015 mini-camps and a summer 2015 camp addressing the AVID Climate Initiative (ACI).
Seimears' mini and summer camps’overarching goal was to initiate an AVID/ACI systemic reform involving Emporia State University, USD 259 Wichita, Kansas and USD 490 EL Dorado, Kansas; and Butler Community College (BCC) and to train each participant from USD 259 Wichita, Kansas; USD 490 EL Dorado, Kansas; and Butler Community College (BCC) to the use of the newly developed ACI curriculum. USD 259 is an urban district, USD 490 is a rural school district both with underrepresented populations of minority and first generation education students. Specifically, the camps were designed to analyze the impact of Aerosols in relationship to the atmosphere as well as create climate experiences and experiments that could easily be replicated district wide. In addition, the program exposed both students and teachers to the possibilities of STEM Climate careers. Two ESU faculty, one BCC science faculty member and eleven rural students, eight teachers and twelve pre-service teacher candidates from five high school AVID programs within USD 259 and USD 490 participated.

   The highlights of the program were: 1.) determining Wichita might have too much brake dust in the air above the city, and 2.) discovering the existence of burning pasture Aerosols in air around rural parts of Kansas.  Participants commented, “This was very exciting, we had no idea that even sea spray can be an Aerosol in the air. We always thought it was only hair spray or paint cans.” Students built a solar dehydrator as a final project.

   If future funding becomes available, Seimears plans to invite urban students and teachers from the Kansas City area to participate next year. He wants to continue to encourage students, especially those from lower economic and underrepresented communities, to pursue STEM climate careers .

AVID, which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a global nonprofit program whose mission is to close the achievement gap by preparing all students for college or other post secondary opportunities.  

The 2015 Kansas NSF EPSCoR Education and Diversity Grants were designed to enhance STEM education in Kansas by supporting activities that will lead to an expanded STEM workforce and prepare a new generation for STEM careers in the areas of climate or energy research or atomic/molecular/optical science.

Kansas EPSCoR Climate and Energy Exhibit travels to the Courtland Art Center

The Courtland Art Center in Courtland Kansas is featuring the Kansas NSF EPSCoR research exhibit on renewable energy and climate change.  The EPSCoR exhibit is titled Kansas: Climate and Energy Central, which is the central theme of the major research initiative, Climate Change and Energy: Basic Science, Impacts and Mitigation.

This traveling exhibit showcases the research of Kansas scientists who worked together to address the challenges Kansas faces in the areas of renewable energy and climate change. The key components of the research exhibit are broken down into four modular displays. These modular displays focus on the exploration of following research themes:

1. Farmscapes examines Kansas farmer’s land practices and the impact of their choices
2. Climate Science presents locally collected data and illustrates how climate trends are defined, compared and used to make future decisions. 
3. Energy explores better ways to use the sun’s energy, examines the potential of protein based solar cells and investigates the role of nanotechnology
4. Pathways explains how Native American traditions can be utilized to create a balanced relationship with nature.

The exhibit will be featured at the Courtland Art Center from now through February 29, 2016. Arrangements to visit the exhibit can be made by calling 785-527-0941 or emailing nick@jenrusfreelance.com. 

This exhibit originated with the Flint Hills Discovery Center museum in Manhattan, KS. 

Special thanks for developing this exceptional community outreach project goes to the team of Kansas EPSCoR scientists and faculty: Dietrich Earnhart, Department of Economics, University of Kansas; Charles W. Rice, Department of Agronomy, Kansas State University; Judy Wu, Department of Physics, University of Kansas; Joane Nagel, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas; and Dan Wildcat, American Indian Studies, Haskell Indian Nations University along with Chuck Regier and Joel Gaeddert of the Flint Hills Design company. 

Learn more about this exhibit here:  http://courtlandarts.com/blog/2016/1/climate-science-exhibit

2015-2016 Kansas EPSCoR First Awards Announced

Kansas NSF EPSCoR provides funding support for Kansas to build its research capacity and competitiveness in science and technology. One mechanism utilized to provide this support is the Kansas NSF EPSCoR First Award program. This program is designed to assist early career faculty with becoming more competitive for funding from the research directorates at the National Science Foundation by: 1) encouraging early career faculty to submit proposals to the NSF (or other federal funding agency) as soon as possible after their first faculty appointment, and 2) by accelerating the pace of their research and the quality of their subsequent proposals. 

For the 2015-2016 academic year, Kansas NSF EPSCoR honored six faculty members from across the state with First Award grants in the areas of Climate and Energy Research or Atomic/Molecular/Optical Science. The researchers and  their projects that were awarded the Kansas NSF EPSCoR funding are:

Placidus Amama
Assistant Professor 
Chemical Engineering
Kansas State University

Nanocarbon Hybrid Structures for Fast and Reversible Lithium Ion Storage

Current efforts to increase the performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have focused on decreasing the diffusion distance of Li ions through the use of nanostructured electrodes with unique geometries. The use of 30 nanostructured electrodes with exceptionally short ion and electron transport distance will result in a significant decrease in the diffusion time. Significant enhancement in the LIB performance of over 50% is anticipated with the use of 3D nanocarbon electrodes. However, efforts thus far have failed to produce 3D nanostructured electrodes with the optimal architecture and textural properties due to the limited understanding of the complex electrochemical interactions within the multicomponent 3D electrode system (current collector, active material, and electrolyte). Consequently, there is a complete lack of guidelines for the rational design and synthesis of high-performance 30 nanostructured electrodes. The goal of this research is to fabricate high-performance 30 electrodes using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the nanoscale building blocks.

Hitesh Bindra
Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering
Kansas State University

A novel method to simultaneously separate CO2 and recover thermal energy from flue gases

This project will focus on evaluation of PI’s recent invention ‘Sliding Flow Method (SFM)’ for simultaneous energy and CO2 recovery from flue gases in fossil-fueled plants. The proposed method first recovers heat energy from the flue gases, and then utilizes same energy to recover CO2. The primary objective of this work is to measure the unknown critical design parameter i.e. axial dispersion of adsorbed CO2 molecules in a packed powder bed. Spectroscopy and other characterization techniques will be applied under different experimental conditions. Once determined, the axial dispersion values will be used for the development of a higher efficiency adsorption based flue gas purification system. A laboratory scale version of this purification system would be developed to assess the performance. This new concept proposed here has potential to fulfill the objectives of reducing the discharge if undesirable components into atmosphere with negligible water consumption and energy destruction when installed in the flue gas exhaust of existing plants. The nature of the proposed research is novel and transformative solution to one of the fourteen Grand Challenges in Engineering, as identified by National Academy of Engineering.

Alice Boyle
Assistant Professor
Biology
Kansas State University

Consequences of climate variability for prairie birds

The proposed project is central to the Kansas NSF EPSCoR focus on climate, investigating biotic responses to current climatic variability, filling crucial gaps in knowledge that limit our ability to predict and manage for the consequences of future climate change. Prairies are characterized by highly variable climate, yet we lack the theoretical knowledge to predict whether adaptions to such conditions offers organisms greater resilience to additional change, or whether they already experience conditions near the limits of their physiological capabilities. This study capitalizes upon a 28-yr data set of avian abundances and the infrastructure and experimental manipulations made possible by the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program at the Konza Prairie in NE Kansas. It integrates the insights from long-term data with detailed, mechanistic, individual-level data from a marked population of declining songbirds to predict biotic responses to future environmental conditions. This project provides exceptional opportunities for field-based training in research for undergraduates, and concrete plans for broad dissemination of study results commensurate with the scope of this funding opportunity. 

Zheng Chen
Assistant Professor
Electrical Enginnering and Computer Science
Wichita State University

Solar Energy Storage Using Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite Enhanced Water Electrolysis for Hydrogen Production

The long-term goal of this research is to develop an energy-efficient solar energy storage system. Existing solar energy harvesting systems are facing a critical issue in that the harvested solar energy is not storable. Ionic polymer-metal composites (IPMCs) have a built-in water electrolysis capability that can convert electricity to storable hydrogen fuel. However, the energy-conversion efficiency of IPMC-enabled electrolysis needs to be further improved in order to make the energy storage more efficient. The research objective of this project is to improve the energy-conversion efficiency of IPMC-enabled electrolysis through advanced fabrication, multi-physics modeling, and robust control from a system perspective. The educational/outreach objectives are to equip engineers with state-of-the-art modeling, advanced fabrication, and control skills and to inform the public society about solar renewable energy systems. The project accomplishes its objectives by the following:

• Investigating energy-conversion efficiency of IPMC-enabled electrolysis.
• Developing a multi-physics and control-oriented model for IPMC-enabled electrolysis.
• Developing an adaptive and robust control strategy for IPMC-enabled electrolysis.
• Developing a micro-fabrication process to fabricate micro-thin IPMC film.
• Integrating and evaluating the solar energy storage system. 

Michael Clift
Assistant Professor
Chemistry
The University of Kansas

Sustainable Catalytic Methods for the Conversion of Biomass into Fine Chemicals

The long-term goal of this research program is to develop cofactor mimics as catalysts to enable novel synthetic transformations initiated by C-H and C-C bond cleavage. This approach to chemical synthesis is unique in that it relies on bond cleavage reactions to generate versatile reactive intermediates that will participate in a wide range of subsequent reactions. By contrast, classical synthetic approaches often focus exclusively on the development of bond forming reactions. The overall objective of this proposal is to develop new methods for quinone catalyzed C-C bond cleavage that will facilitate the conversion of bio-renewable feedstock chemicals into fine nitrogen-containing chemical commodities. Further, we seek to promote scientific curiosity and enhance the problem-solving skills of undergraduate students by integrating specific aspects of the proposed research into an innovative, inquiry based laboratory experiment for organic chemistry lab courses. Several aims are proposed to pursue these objectives:

• Develop topa quinone (TPQ) mimics as catalysts to enable the oxidative decarboxylation of α-amino acids to provide versatile imine intermediates that will be utilized in subsequent in situ additions to generate amine-containing fine chemicals.
• Develop TPQ mimics as catalysts to promote the depolymerization of lignin model compounds via C-C bond cleavage at the β -O-4 linkage to deliver imines and other useful products.
• Develop and implement an inquiry-based laboratory experiment for undergraduate organic chemistry students using quinone catalysis to enable amino alcohol cleavage.

Gisuk Hwang
Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering
Wichita State University

Absorption-Controlled Thermal Diode and Switch (ACTS)

Completely new and unified theoretical/experimental frameworks of thermal diode and switching mechanisms are proposed using adsorption-controlled thermal transport in gas-filled heterogeneous nanostructures. This enables a) serving scalable and efficient thermal management systems (R > 15) with both theory and experiment, b) understanding atomic-level thermal transport mechanisms through thin adsorbed film in the nanostructures, and c) developing a basic building block for advanced thermal managements for highly-efficient, responsive renewable energy/environmental systems and completely new energy-saving applications i.e., thermal logic gate/computing. Despite rigorous advances in theory, experimental demonstrations for the practical applications have been much lagged behind. Main challenges have been poor steady-state efficiency/transient response time, difficult large-scale manufacturing, and limited operating conditions (very low pressure and cryogenic operation temperatures). Thus, an innovative approach that enables both high thermal diode/switch efficiency with fast transient response and experimental realizations would be highly transformative to carry significant impacts for clean energy and environment future.  This work will advance fundamental understandings of atomic-level thermal transport mechanisms through the thin film (adsorbed layers) near heterogeneous surfaces for energy, nanomanufacturing and biomedical systems.

Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity in AMO Physics

The Kansas NSF EPSCoR Track 2 Grant provides support for three Kansas undergraduate students to conduct Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics research at Kansas State University during the summer of 2016. Students who are accepted into the program will receive a $5,200 stipend and have both travel expenses as well as on-campus room and board covered.

Students interested in the chemistry and/or physics associated with Atomic, Molecular and Optical Phyics should apply through this link:

K-State AMO Physics Summer 2016 REU
(only online applications are accepted)

For more information go to: https://www.phys.ksu.edu/images/reu/flyer.pdf .

Education and outreach funding for this REU opportunity is provided by the Kansas and Nebraska NSF EPSCoR Track 2 Grant #1430519 titled: "Imaging and Controlling Ultrafast Dynamics of Atoms, Molecules, and Nanostructures."  The grant's educational objectives are designed to enhance STEM education in Kansas by supporting activities that will lead to an expanded STEM workforce or prepare a new generation for STEM careers in the areas of atomic/molecular/optical science.

EPSCoR Interjurisdictional Collaborative Funding Opportunity: FY 2016 RII Track-2 FEC

    The National Science Foundation Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is currently offering a collaborative funding opportunity within its RII Track-2 FEC grant program initiative. The RII Track-2 FEC grants are designed to build interjurisdictional collaborative teams of EPSCoR investigators in scientific focus areas consistent with NSF priorities. Projects are investigator-driven, have at least one co-PI and must include researchers from at least two RII-eligible jurisdictions.  Proposals must describe a comprehensive and integrated vision to drive discovery and build sustainable Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) capacity.  The education activities should seek to broaden participation of different types of individuals, institutions, and sectors. In addition, the development and support of diverse early-career faculty is critical to the sustainability of STEM capacity. Only one proposal can be submitted for a project.  Separately submitted collaborative proposals are not allowed.

Researchers interested in participating in the FY 2016 RII Track-2 FEC process are invited to submit proposals on two topics: 

      1. Understanding the Brain; and 
      2. Sustainable Food, Energy, and Water Systems.

DUE DATES:
      Letter of Intent Deadline Date:  January 11, 2016

      Full Proposal Deadline Date:  February 4, 2016

For more information go to: 
EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: Track-2 Focused EPSCoR Collaborations (RII Track-2 FEC)

Hispanic Students Explore Fiber Optics and the Internet at the 9th Annual Si Se Puede Hacer Ciencias y Matimaticas Program

Dr. Trallero conducting a demonstration

   Dr. Carlos Trallero, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Kansas State University (KSU) traveled to Emporia State University (ESU) on Halloween to work with some of the more than 50 Hispanic middle school students attending ESU’s 9th Annual Si Se Puede Hacer Ciencias y Matimaticas Program. The purpose of the Si Se Puede Hacer Ciencias y Matimaticas Saturday event was to allow students to interact with Hispanic professionals who work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. This year’s program featured four hands-on workshops taught in a small group settting. Dr. Betsy Yanik, Professor of Mathematics and Si Se Puede Hacer Ciencias y Matimaticas Director at ESU created the Saturday workshop opportunity to spark STEM interest among participants and address the country’s need for more graduates from underrepresented groups to pursue degrees and careers in STEM fields.
    In Trallero's workshop, he posed the question "How does the internet work?" After a brief discussion, students observed demonstrations illustrating how fiber optics actually work. Trallero commented, "the students enjoyed seeing how light is bended as it transmits through fiber optics, the backbone of the internet." To provide some additional one on one instructional assistance, Trallero invited Kansas native and first generation KSU Physics student Jaime Minjarez to join him.  Following the demonstrations, Trallero and Minjarez fielded questions as students discovered how to build a motor with just copper wire, a battery and a magnet.

Students building motors

   Trallero and Minjarez considered the experience both fun and rewarding, and they plan to participate in the program again next year.

The Kansas EPSCoR office supported the visit of Professor Carlos A. Trallero and student Jaime Minjarez of the Physics Department and the James R. Macdonald Laboratory at Kansas State University through the outreach program of a Kansas-Nebraska EPSCoR Track II grant.