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MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach activities • MRSEC contributions to education involving the industrial sector • Undergraduate/graduate/postdoc collaborating with industry • Lifelong learning and skill building for industrial scientists and engineers • Challenges: intellectual property, retention of technical contacts • Best practices vary by research area MRSEC Industrial Partners (358 total) Small (< $10 million): 102 Medium (> $10 - $100 million): 69 Survey years: 2002-2004 18 of 27 MRSECs reporting (November 2004) Large (> $100 million): 187 MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach activities • Survey years: 2002 - 2004 • 90 workshops and symposia involving more than 3600 industrial participants • Collaborative research with industry - 93 MRSEC undergraduates - 228 graduate students/postdocs • Effective leveraging and two-way knowledge exchange • Early student exposure to the industrial sector • Most students supported by a combination of MRSEC and industrial funds Graduate students and postdocs performing collaborative research with industrial partners(228 total) Spintronics and Information Technology An Electronic Pump for Nuclear Spins • Magnetics Heterostructures IRG at the University of Minnesota • A spin-based storage information device that combines a material ordinarily used for information storage (iron) with a common semiconductor (gallium arsenide). • Significant advance: electron spin - the property that carries information - is retained when it passes into the semiconductor. • Ordinarily this information, often referred to as spin polarization, decays in roughly one-billionth of a second. • In this new device the electrons transfer their spin to the nuclei that form the cores of atoms in the semiconductor. • Unlike the electrons, the nuclei can retain their spin for many minutes, after which their spin can be read by electrons. • This type of read/write device therefore can allow nuclear spin to be used as a processing element in computer. • [J. Strand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 036602 (2003).] Spin-polarized electrons (orange spheres) tunnel through the barrier separating ferromagnetic iron (orange) from a semiconductor (gray). Once inside the semiconductor, the electrons transfer their spin to nuclei (gray spheres). University of Minnesota MRSEC Polymersomes: Tough Vesicles Made from Diblock Copolymers • A joint effort between the University of Minnesota and University of Pennsylvania MRSECs • Giant “polymersomes” 10x tougher than lipid vesicles • Less permeable to water than typical phospholipid bilayers • Storage vehicles for reagents; candidates for targeted drug delivery Amphiphilic block copolymer = lipid-like bilayer Vesicle immediately after electroformation After encapsulation of 10-kD Texas Red-labeled dextran Science, 1999, 284, 1143