Turning the Tables on Mentoring  

The center seeks to provide graduate and postgraduate training in research and other professional skills; to guide hands-on education about materials and Materials Science, provide support for local teachers, and encourage student research at the secondary level.

In 2015, the University of Minnesota MRSEC expanded its American Indian Outreach activities with the inaugural American Indian Visit Day. On November 7, 2015, 270 American Indian middle and high school students were invited to UMN for a day of activities to introduce opportunities in STEM available at UMN.  The students participated in hands on activities presented by each of the three MRSEC IRGs exposing them to research in multiple science and engineering fields.  Additionally, the students toured campus cultural offices and heard from American Indian student and alumni speakers.

The notion of handedness or chirality (Greek for “hand”) is ubiquitous in chemistry, biology and physics. In quantum field theory, all massless particles (e.g. neutrinos) are chiral. The left- and right-handed populations are independent and never mix (Fig. A). However, inter-conversion occurs once electromagnetic fields are turned on. The field-induced mixing -- known as the chiral anomaly – produces an “axial current”. The effect was predicted in 1983 to occur in crystals. This was recently confirmed in the Dirac semimetal Na3Bi [1].

A thin liquid crystal film on a surface of photoactive dye turns into a wonderland of exotic moving patterns if just illuminated by a simple lamp.  Spirals move and oscillate across the surface in the form of advancing wavefronts, encountering and annihilating each other.

A codon-scrambling algorithm enables the PCR-based synthesis of repetitive proteins by finding the least-repetitive synonymous gene sequence