A unique National Science Foundation Integrated Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (NSF-IGERT) grant is supporting training in soft materials research for a joint City College and Columbia University program that brings together chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, physics, and chemistry professors and graduate students. Soft materials are organic media in the form of complex fluids or soft solids that organize on supramolecular length scales via weak interactions. They are ubiquitous in nature as well as in manufactured products; typical examples include food and consumer products, thin polymeric films for sensors, organic blends for electronic displays and high-performance materials, and natural and artificial tissue.
Heading the CUNY-Columbia partnership is Morton M. Denn, a member of The Graduate Center's doctoral faculty and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Engineering and Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Engineering at City College. Professor Denn also directs City College's Benjamin Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics, an internationally known interdisciplinary research institute and one of CUNY's major research centers. The Levich Institute specializes in studying the fundamental problems of flow and transport in complex fluids, fluid-like media, and interfaces, including polymer melts and solutions, liquid crystals, granular materials, suspensions, colloids, and amphiphiles. The institute's seven faculty members and two Levich-associated faculty comprise the City College arm of the CUNY-Columbia doctoral training program in soft materials research.
http://lisgi1.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/ and http://softmaterials-igert.org/