PHASE 1 OF M-STAR CENTER GETS INVESTMENT FROM NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
The National Science Foundation has awarded UChicago’s M-STAR Center of Chemical Innovation program $1.8 million as a Phase 1 Research Center. M-STAR, which is short for MXene Synthesis, Tunability and Reactivity, will be designed as a incubator of MXene study and a major nexus for materials science research.
With NSF’s investment, Phase I of the new research center will help fund resources used to develop the science, management, and broader impacts of the center before moving onto Phase II, which will focus on tackling long-term chemical research challenges. Phase I of the project began on Sept 1st of this year and is expected to last three years.
M-STAR’s mission to research and develop the growing field of MXene research and application are led by UChicago Professors Dmitri Talapin, whose recent MXene research was published in Nature Chemistry, and John Anderson. However, M-Star’s mission to “produce transformative research, lead to innovation, and attract broad scientific and public interest” is a multi-institutional effort that includes investigators from UPenn, Drexel, Vanderbilt and Purdue.
MXenes are functional 2-D material largely considered a major future area of development in materials science research. According to the proposal, “MXenes represent the most rapidly growing family of functional 2D materials, exhibiting great promise in the areas of energy storage, filtration and separation technologies, medicine, optoelectronics, and composite materials.”