Notre Dame Nanoscience and Technology (NDnano) welcomed 21 students to campus over the summer as part of the NDnano Undergraduate Research Fellowship (NURF) program. The 2024 cohort included students from the University of Notre Dame, Purdue University, Ball State University, Bethel University, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, and Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Each student selected is paired with one or more of Notre Dame’s world class faculty for a 10-week research experience and immersed in the research group – reading relevant research publications, learning proper laboratory safety, and participating in group meetings.

The students from the NURF program have each prepared a written summary, available on the NDnano website, to recap their summer 2024 experience.

“Undergraduate research programs, like NURF, help to introduce students to academic research, and allow students to contribute to research while gaining skills that will benefit them as they develop their career,” said Derek Lake, NDnano associate director. “We are grateful for the partnership with NDnano affiliated faculty that makes this program possible.”

In the summaries, students define the problem being faced and the research goal; describe lab skills acquired, equipment used, and experiments conducted; and explain their results and conclusions. Highlighted here are three student summaries that illustrate the high-level of hands-on experience gained by the students.

In his second summer as part of the NURF program, Notre Dame's Daniel Noronha was able to build on the project he started with Professors Greg Snider and Alexei Orlov (Department of Electrical Engineering) in summer 2023 and continued through the academic year. In his summer 2024 recap, Daniel explained that his task was to design, fabricate, and test aluminum nitride microelectromechanical system resonators (see image) to determine how geometry affects a resonator’s electrical characteristics (resonant frequency and Q factor). Daniel explains his research here.

Working with the groups of Professors Kaiyu Fu (Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry) and Bill Phillip (Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), Notre Dame's Marie Schafer learned many scientific skills in the course of her project to develop a biocompatible nanostructured membrane to improve the longevity of biosensors. Her skill set now includes casting thin membranes using a spin coating process and functionalizing the membranes, as well as testing, analysis, and explaining her research in different settings and styles, including the Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium. Marie provides details here.

Gergő Németh from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary conducted summer research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy with Professor László Forró's group. Over the summer, Gergo explored the possibility of achieving superconductivity in transition metal dichalcogenides through p-type doping. The project involved chemical doping and ionic gating techniques to alter the electronic properties of WSe₂ and MoS₂ crystals. Learn more about Gergo's project.

Support for the NDnano Fellowships is provided by Notre Dame Research, the Woodward Family Endowment for Excellence in NDnano Undergraduate Research, and other external funding sources supporting faculty research.

The application process for the summer 2025 NURF program opens in December at nano.nd.edu.

Originally published by NDnano Staff at nano.nd.edu on October 31, 2024.