Penn State’s Materials Research Lab Receives $800,000 Grant
January 9, 2000
University Park, Pa.– The W. M. Keck Foundation has awarded an $800,000 grant to Penn State’s Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) to provide funding for a new laboratory specially designed to support MRL’s work in smart materials.

"Right now, MRL is designing devices that bring together electrical, mechanical and optical functions to create a new generation of integrated components," said Gary Messing, director of MRL and professor of ceramic science and engineering. "We want to extend the ideas of integration and miniaturization beyond the realm of silicon integrated circuits."

Smart materials are those that can both sense a change in the environment and respond to that change in a useful way, according to Robert Newnham, an emeritus faculty at MRL and MatSE, who is one of the pioneers of the field. "We’re thrilled because the grant from the Keck Foundation will allow us to extend our ideas into a whole new family of materials that are difficult to introduce into conventional clean rooms," Newnham said.

In addition to the $800,000 grant, MRL will receive $310,000 in University funds to cover the estimated cost of the $1.1 million laboratory, which will be housed in MRL’s current facilities at University Park. The W. M. Keck Smart Materials Integration Laboratory will be staffed and open for use by students and faculty at Penn State. MRL faculty will work closely with the medical, communications, consumer electronics, manufacturing and transportation industries on the integration of novel materials into devices.

"When you open up a computer or a cell phone, there are often hundreds of individual components on the main boards," said MRL’s associate director Susan Trolier-McKinstry, who is also an associate professor of ceramic science and engineering and will head the lab. "The Keck Laboratory will greatly enhance our ability to learn how to co-process many of these devices, so that they can be made smaller, lighter and less expensive. This is just one example of the type of work the Keck Laboratory will enable. We will also be using the new facility to build novel miniature sensors for medical diagnostics and industrial equipment monitoring, optical components for telecommunications, and tiny actuators for minimally invasive surgery."

MRL is an interdisciplinary unit, bringing together fields such as mathematics, physics, materials science and engineering, electrical engineering and acoustics. It is internationally recognized for work in ferroelectrics and smart materials, and for the design of devices such as the ultrasonic probe used for prenatal monitoring, electronic components for cell phones and passive electronics for consumer electronics.

The new facility is scheduled to open in spring 2001.

The Los Angeles-based W. M. Keck Foundation is a philanthropic organization founded in 1954. It awards grants to support research in medicine, science and engineering.

Contacts: Mike Bezilla 863-4512 (work) 238-5842 (home) mxb13@psu.edu
Anne Danahy 863-4512 (work) 466-4834 (home) acd2@psu.edu