Interdisciplinary Course Development in Nanostructured Materials Science and Engineering

Introduction

Over the past twenty years, nanomaterials science and engineering has become almost pervasive in the technical disciplines. In the early 1990’s, the reporting of material properties on the scale of submicron scale using scanning and/or transmission electron microscopy seemed to be at the cutting edge. After the discovery of the Buckyball (C₆₀ or Buckminsterfullerene), new terms such as nanotubes, nanoparticles, nanowires and a varied assortment of atomic scale crystalline morphologies quickly gained notoriety. Unfortunately, not every academic program, especially B.S. and M.S. level granting programs, had access to nanoscale characterization equipment such as transmission electron and scanning tunneling microscopes, required to fully peer into the nanoscale. Thus a nanoscale divide in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education had also begun. Unfortunately many STEM students from universities with developing research infrastructures gained college and graduate level degrees without significant training in nanoscale science and engineering.