A decision-making algorithm uses this surrogate model of X-ray scattering data. Data were collected and processed automatically. The model illustrates function evolution as the experiment is steered and new data are gathered. Red dots indicate measurement positions; sizes represent variances.
Soft Materials – Autonomous Experimentation – Science Policy
New graduate research training programs are needed to provide tomorrow’s leaders with tools for tackling the complex grand challenges that our world is facing.
Welcome
Welcome to the University of Pennsylvania’s National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Program, which is one of the 22 new NRTs in the country for 2022. Our Penn NRT is designed to equip our graduate student trainees to advance soft materials research using autonomous experimentation. Our trainees’ will be able to deploy novel research approaches, findings, and technologies for societal impact beyond the laboratory with broad skills training in communication, transdisciplinary collaboration, and science policy.
Formally, our NRT is called, Interdisciplinary Training in Data Driven Soft Materials Research and Science Policy (D2SMRSP). Colloquially, we call it Soft AE.
Our Community
Soft AE Program trainees, and their faculty mentors, will join us from STEM graduate groups in Penn Engineering and in Penn Arts and Sciences’ Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry departments, as well as from the Center for Soft and Living Matter. Formal and informal programming will support frequent and sustained interactions at the interface of soft AE with science policy with students and colleagues from many of Penn’s other disciplines (e.g., Design, Wharton, Law), with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy serving as the anchoring institution. External partners at National Laboratories, other academic institutions, governmental agencies and within the community (local and abroad) will play important roles in our traineeship.
Our Soft AE Program will build a community that spans a broad range of disciplinary and experiential backgrounds and expertise. Together, this rich and diverse group of scholars and practitioners will create a synergistic and powerful learning-teaching-engaging action model.
Professor Chinedum Osuji, our Program Director, gives an overview of Penn’s Soft AE Program (NSF NRT: Interdisciplinary Training in Data Driven Soft Materials Research and Science Policy (D2SMRSP)).