AFOSR MURI Award

The award (1 million per year for 5 years) will be shared approximately equally between Cornell and Columbia (Columbia is the lead). The principal investigator is Rick Osgood at Columbia and Professor Michael Spencer will lead the Cornell efforts. Other members on the Cornell team include: ECE faculty Sandip Tiwari, Edwin Kan, Farhan Rana as well as Paul McEuen in Physics.

The award centers on the exploitation of the material graphene for new device applications. Graphene or single monolayer, single crystal graphite has seen an explosion of interest worldwide. Columbia building on DARPA funding and Cornell building on NSF CCMR funding have large numbers of faculty interested in the properties and applications of these materials. In addition to the recent MURI funding, and the ongoing CCMR funding Cornell and Columbia are in the finals of a NSF STC competition centered on graphene research.

According to the Department of Defense (DoD), “The awards are the result of the fiscal 2009 competition that … AFOSR conducted under the DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program. The MURI program supports research by teams of investigators that intersect more than one traditional science and engineering discipline in order to accelerate both research progress and transition of research results to application. Most MURI efforts involve researchers from multiple academic institutions and academic departments. Based on the proposals selected in the fiscal 2009 competition, a total of 69 academic institutions are expected to participate in 41 research efforts.” [read the full release]