Gabrielle Wooden, a junior at Howard College majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to enhance the sustainability and life cycles of pure sources and supplies. Her work within the Supplies Initiative for Complete Analysis Alternative (MICRO) program has given her hands-on expertise with many alternative elements of analysis, together with MATLAB programming, experimental design, information evaluation, figure-making, and scientific writing.
Wooden can be one in every of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities round the US to take part within the first MICRO Summit earlier this 12 months. The internship program, developed by the MIT Division of Supplies Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third 12 months, this system continues to develop, offering much more alternatives for non-MIT undergraduate college students — together with the MICRO Summit and this system’s growth to incorporate Northwestern College.
“I believe probably the most useful elements of the MICRO program is the power to do analysis long run with an skilled professor in supplies science and engineering,” says Wooden. “My college has restricted alternatives for undergraduate analysis in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to realize useful expertise on this discipline, which I might not in any other case have.”
Like Wooden, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry main at Manhattan Faculty, values the publicity to supplies science, particularly since she is just not capable of study as a lot about it at her house establishment.
“I realized quite a bit about crystallography and defects in supplies by the MICRO curriculum, particularly by movies,” says Garcia. “The analysis itself may be very useful, as effectively, as a result of we get to use what we’ve realized by the movies within the analysis we do remotely.”
Increasing analysis alternatives
From the start, the MICRO program was designed as a completely distant, rigorous training and mentoring program focused towards college students from underserved backgrounds fascinated by pursuing graduate college in supplies science or associated fields. Interns are matched with school to work on their particular analysis pursuits.
Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that analysis initiatives for the interns are designed to be work that they’ll do remotely, corresponding to creating a machine-learning algorithm or an information evaluation strategy.
“It’s vital to notice that it’s not nearly what this system and college are bringing to the coed interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Studying Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Studying and the Institute’s tutorial departments. “The scholars are doing actual analysis and work, and creating issues of actual worth. It’s very a lot an alternate.”
Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of supplies science and engineering at Northwestern College, had helped to ascertain MICRO at MIT from the very starting. As soon as at Northwestern, she rapidly realized that increasing MICRO to Northwestern would supply much more analysis alternatives to interns than by counting on MIT alone — leveraging the college’s sturdy supplies science and engineering division, in addition to providing sources for biomaterials analysis by Northwestern’s medical college. This system obtained funding from 3M and formally launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Roughly half of the MICRO interns are actually in this system with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wooden and Garcia each take part in this system through Northwestern.
“By increasing to a different college, we’ve been capable of have interns work with a wider vary of analysis initiatives,” says Chazot. “It has develop into simpler for us to put college students with school and analysis that match their pursuits.”
Constructing neighborhood
The MICRO program obtained a Larger Schooling Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Schooling Lab, a part of MIT Open Studying, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for 3 days of displays, workshops, and campus excursions — together with a tour of the MIT.nano constructing — in addition to varied community-building actions.
“An enormous a part of MICRO is the neighborhood,” says Chazot. “A spotlight of the summit was simply seeing the scholars come collectively.”
The summit additionally included panel discussions that allowed interns to realize insights and recommendation from graduate college students and professionals. The graduate panel dialogue included MIT graduate college students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The profession panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vp and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown College; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern College and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior course of engineer at 6K.
College students additionally had a chance to share their work with one another by analysis displays. Their displays coated a variety of matters, together with: creating a pc program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers utilized in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle evaluation of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental affect compared to a regular silicon microchip; and making use of machine studying algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy photos of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic materials.
“The summit was fantastic and the perfect tutorial expertise I’ve had as a first-year school pupil,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who’s pursuing a serious in chemistry and twin diploma biomedical engineering at Spelman Faculty and participates in MICRO by MIT. “I acquired to fulfill so many college students who had been all in grades above me … and I realized just a little about find out how to navigate school as an upperclassman.”
“I even have a particularly shut friendship with one of many college students, and we communicate frequently,” provides La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave useful recommendation about functions and suggestion letters that might be helpful after I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate colleges.”
Seeking to the longer term, MICRO organizers hope to proceed to develop this system’s attain.
“We’d like to see different colleges taking up this mannequin,” says Sandland. “There are numerous alternatives on the market. The extra departments, analysis teams, and mentors that become involved with this program, the extra affect it could possibly have.”
