Dr. Jodie Lutkenhaus, the William and Ruth Neely Faculty Fellow and assistant professor of in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is a member of a multidisciplinary team responsible for the design and deployment of a National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) program titled “Data-Enabled Discovery and Design of Energy Materials (D3EM).” The five-year, $3 million grant was recently awarded to Texas A&M. Lutkenhaus will oversee student mentoring in the program.
The D3EM initiative leverages interdisciplinary graduate level curriculum opportunities for students who are accepted into the two-year sponsorship program. Currently, students in Lutkenhaus’ research lab primarily study materials. The introduction of D3EM will allow participants to also engage in design and informatics research.
“My hope is to recruit chemical engineering students in this new area,” said Lutkenhaus. “Materials, informatics and design separately are pretty established but when you combine them all it becomes a whole new thing, which is part of the Materials Genome Initiative.”
In addition to academics, seminars and networking opportunities will be available for program participants.
“They become part of the NRT community and that means they get to spend time with student and faculty mentors committed to this new area of research,” said Lutkenhaus.
Upon graduation, students will receive a certificate. The principal investigator is Dr. Raymundo Arróyave, associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering.