Scientia: Research at the University of Tennessee
Substance Matters
By CLIFTON WOODS
Discoveries by UT's internationally prominent materials scientists will bolster Tennessee's economic vitality and provide the building blocks for tomorrow's technological advances
Imagine our modern society equipped only with materials made of wood, stone, bronze, and iron. That's hard to fathom. Yet were it not for an ever-accelerating process of discovery—beginning millennia ago with techniques for forging metal tools and continuing through today's silicon-based devices, alloys, ceramics, and composites—we might still be wielding implements made of crude unprocessed materials. Still harder to grasp is what the future might hold, with the emergence of even more specialized materials that derive from advances in our fundamental understanding of atomic and molecular properties.
This issue of Scientia (our classics professors recommend the pronunciation "skee-EN-tee-uh") focuses on the University of Tennessee's diverse portfolio in materials research, an area in which UT and its partner Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have long maintained international prominence. This broad research realm directly engages physics, chemistry, and engineering, while involving myriad other areas of scientific investigation.
Operating on the nanoscale—the scale of atoms and molecules—UT researchers are devising new polymers that may contribute to the exploitation of new energy sources, using spectrometers to reveal clues to the complexity and the hidden properties of various substances, and employing powerful computers to predict the likely characteristics of yet-to-be-developed materials.
In other laboratories, UT researchers are building, measuring, and manipulating impossibly small devices that are advancing fields as wide ranging as information science and healthcare. In yet other facilities, UT scientists are building fingernail-sized sensors that could warn of chemical or biological contaminants in food or water supplies.
UT's 60-year partnership with ORNL now benefits from the ORNL–based Spallation Neutron Source and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. UT's creation of the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials, a 100,000 square foot facility to be built on the UT campus, will further contribute to multidisciplinary research in materials science.
The real economic and technological payoff for Tennessee and the rest of the nation lies not just in the discovery of new material properties but in moving these discoveries quickly from the university laboratory to the marketplace. In response to that challenge, UT's colleges of engineering and business have developed a joint master's degree that provides students with the technological and entrepreneurial skills required to bridge the distance between insight in the lab and a final product in the hands of consumers.
But cultivating the next generation of materials scientists must begin earlier still, at the undergraduate level, and UT is increasingly exposing its undergraduate students in the sciences to discovery-based learning that's grounded in the laboratory rather than the lecture hall. The future also requires that our students develop an understanding of the global community of which they are a part. To that end, UT has embarked on a university-wide program, "Ready for the World," that will assist UT graduates in exploring their places in today's world.
Scientia, like any magazine, can only scratch the surface of ongoing UT scholarship and research. I hope the articles in this issue prompt you to explore further and learn more about our university. You can find more information on UT's projects, programs, and staff at www.tennessee.edu.
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Clifton Woods is the vice-chancellor for research of the University of Tennessee's flagship campus