4 ME Faculty Win Department of Defense Awards

Four members of the Mechanical Engineering faculty are recipients of the Department of Defense MURI and DURIP awards.

DURIP: Acquisition of a Chemical Mechanical Planarizer (CMP); PI: Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR), Co-PIs: Gary Rubloff (MNE/ISR), Elisabeth Smela (ME)

The Department of Defense (DoD) plans to award $45 million to academic institutions to support the purchase of research instrumentation. Out of the 733 proposals received, 209 were awarded to 102 academic institutions. The awards are made under the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). The DURIP supports the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research. The DURIP meets a critical need by enabling DoD-supported university researchers to purchase scientific equipment costing $50,000 or more. The researchers generally have difficulty purchasing instruments costing that much under research contracts and grants.

MURI: Design of Multifunctional Materials; PIs: William Fourney (AE) and Jaime Cardenas-Garcia (ME). The lead institution on this award is Georgia Tech.

MURI: Fundamental Chemistry and Physics of Direct-Electrochemical Oxidation in Solid-Oxide Fuel Cells. The Maryland PI is Greg Jackson (ME) and Bryan Eichhorn in Chemistry (co-PI). This proposal was made in conjuction with the Colorado School of Mines and CalTech.

This year, the DoD announced plans to award 26 grants totaling $14 million in fiscal 2002, and up to $24 million per year starting in fiscal 2003, to 22 academic institutions to conduct multidisciplinary research in 19 topic areas of basic science and engineering. These grants will be made under the fiscal 2002 DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, a program designed to address large multidisciplinary topic areas representing exceptional opportunities for future DoD applications and technology options. The competition drew many letters of intent to submit proposals, from which 126 full proposals were received.

Published March 27, 2002