MIMER Program: Research and Professional Development

The MRSEC Initiative for Multidisciplinary Education and Research (MIMER) program is designed to enhance the scientific knowledge and skills of science students, post-docs, educators and professionals. The main focus of the MIMER program is team-based interdisciplinary research through high-quality research experiences for students and teachers by integrating the REU and RET programs. A MIMER team assembles researchers with different backgrounds to include a faculty member, graduate students, post-docs, undergraduates (REU), high school teachers (RET), and a high school student. The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the MIMER team encourages synergy and fosters formation of mentoring relationships among team members. The three programs that are infused together into MIMER are:
 

Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)
Research Experiences for Teachers (RET)
Research Experiences for High School Students
2017 Connecticut Microelectronics and Optoelectronics Consortium (CMOC)
2017 Materials and Manufacturing Summer Teachers’ Institute

MIMER research teams make use of numerous state-of-the-art CRISP shared teaching/research facilities at Yale and SCSU. For instance, two of the CRISP specialized research facilities include:

        CRISP NanoCharacterization Facility
        Instructional Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) Facility

Courses developed by CRISP Faculty

CRISP faculty have developed and offered a wide range of new courses impacting undergraduates, graduate students and educators. Most of these courses have used CRISP facilities. Examples include:

Courses for educators in the Masters in Science Education at SCSU, e.g. “Integrated Science Experience: Interdisciplinary Research in Nanotechnology and Microscopy with Interdisciplinary Applications”
Professional science Masters program courses at SCSU, e.g. “Optics and Electron Optics for Modern Microscopy” and “Nanofabrication using Molecular Beam Epitaxy”. The latter course made use of the CRISP Teaching MBE Facility.

Undergraduate courses for non-majors, e.g. “Science of Nanostructures” (SCSU), “Chemistry, Energy, and the Environment” (Yale) and “The Technological World” (Yale)

Graduate courses relating to surfaces and interfaces, e.g., “Surface and Interface Forces” (Yale)
A course module “From Surface to Interface: The Synthesis and Properties of a Crystalline Oxide Silicon Interface” that has been used in undergraduate and graduate courses at both SCSU and Yale.