UC Research Areas:

Each year, the University of Cincinnati's faculty and staff receive over $309 million in sponsored research (http://www.grad.uc.edu). The University's endowment funds exceed $800 million.

These numbers also place the University of Cincinnati in the top 2% of the nation's universities for funding. Of particular note, UC is ranked in the top 19 in NIH funding for all public medical schools. Among all public universities, UC is ranked 22nd nationwide in total research funding (57th among 1158 institutions that receive Federal Science and Engineering research support).

Outstanding facilities for research are available throughout the campuses of the University of Cincinnati. For example, the latest instrumentation for materials research is available for use by IGERT students in the Materials Characterization Center operated by the College of Engineering in the 175,000 sq ft Engineering Research Center (http://www.eng.uc.edu/welcome/collegetour/erc_commons.php3). These include a Philips PW 3710 X-ray diffractometer, Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS), and a complete range of instruments for microscopy that includes a Philips CM-20 Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), Hitachi S400 FEG Scanning Electron Microscope, Digital Instruments Dimension 3100 Scanning Probe Microscope (atomic force microscope), and a Philips XL-30 FEG Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM). The TEM and ESEM instruments are pictured below.

IGERT graduate student Stephen Fenimore prepares a membrane sample for microscopy using the Philips Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM). This instrument is equipped with a High-Brightness Field Emission Gun (FEG) for both low voltage and high resolution. The ESEM is ideal for charactering membrane structures in gaseous environments up to 10 torr and at temperatures as low as -5°C and as high as 1500°C.

Materials Science graduate students, Jixiong Han and Balasubramanian Swaminathan, using the Philips CM-20 TEM (2.7 Å point-to-point and 1.4 Å line-to-line resolution). This transmission electronic microscope is equipped with a 200-kV accelerating voltage and a high brightness LaB6 gun for high coherence and small probes. The facility also includes a high-resolution Gatan TV imaging system and EDAX Genesis XMS 2000 Energy Dispersive System.

IGERT graduate student Dustin Miller (standing) using the Digital Instruments Dimension 3100 Scanning Probe Microscope. This atomic force microscope can be used to provide information on surface roughness and morphology at near atomic resolution. The versatile imaging capabilities of this microscope enables imaging of difficult samples such as liquids, biological materials, organic, and insulators.

Research Associate Denis Bailey (left) demonstrates the operation of the advanced robotic system known as KUKA to a Biomedical Engineering graduate student. The KUKA KR-210 represents an innovative application for advanced industrial robots in scientific research related to biomechanics and tissue engineering. It was provided by the KUKA Robotic Group (Augsburg, Germany) and is controlled by software specifically written and developed for biomechanical applications in research. The KUKA was designed to simulate the in vivo three-dimensional joint motions acting on the knee as to determine the internal stresses and strains experienced by ligament, cartilage, and meniscus tissues over time. In addition to research applications, students are learning how the KUKA robot might be applied to biomechanical testing of functional tissue engineered constructs that are being designed to replace these damaged structures.

Opportunities for Supercomputer Time on IGERT Projects

Extensive internal and external support for high-performance computing is available for IGERT students. For example, the Genome Research Institute (GRI) (http://gri.uc.edu/) houses two SGI dual-processor Tezro graphics workstations, a SGI Altix 3000 16-processor (ItaniumTM 2) server, and a large Opteron cluster. Several large mass storage units and clusters including a 32-processor Altix 3000, Cray X1, SUN SunFire 6800, Pentium 4 cluster, and an AMD system are available at the Ohio Supercomputer Center located near the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus (http://www.osc.edu/). Opportunities are also available to request cpu time on the leadership-class computational facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (http://www.ORNL.gov/) which is about a 5-hour drive from Cincinnati. Research collaborations are also possible with the Materials Laboratory (http://www.ml.afrl.af.mil/) at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) located in Dayton, Ohio. WPAFB supports high-performance computing facilities as well as major facilities for materials characterization and research. In addition, opportunities are available to support computational projects by IGERT students and faculty through the NSF PACI (partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure) supercomputer sites. These PACI sites include the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (http://www.npaci.edu) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (http://www.ncsa.edu/) that provides 10 teraflops of computing capacity (IBM Linux clusters) and 240 terabytes of secondary storage.