NSF IGERT Program

Chemical engineering is part of an interdisciplinary NSF IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education, Research, and Training) program in polymer science, called "Teaching Craft for Macromolecular Creativity." Currently Ben McCoy, Karsten Thompson, and Kerry Dooley are participating faculty. This is a five-year, $3.2 million program to provide a unique university/industrial educational experience for qualified (U.S. citizens or permanent residents) Ph.D. students in all areas of polymer science. When a student participates in IGERT, he or she benefits as follows:

• Since project funding is guaranteed by the NSF, there is greater opportunity to exercise creativity.
• In return for IGERT funding, the adviser agrees to work in a hands-on fashion with the student for the first year of the project.
• IGERT projects are interdisciplinary and typically include an industrial component.
• Special travel opportunities to national or international sites to perform special experiments are available.

The department currently has three students participating in this program—Alan Bussard, Lisa Brenskelle, and Matthew Balhoff. Balhoff also serves as the student "leader" of the program. Furthermore, Balhoff has been nominated by the LSU IGERT program to participate in the "Excellence in Graduate Research Symposium" at the ACS convention in Philadelphia this coming August, at which time he will present his work in a special session. The title of Balhoff's project is "Synthesis and Flow Modeling of Reactive Polymers."