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Mission, Objectives, and Strategies


As an educational institution, it is not sufficient simply to provide access to the services of materials characterization facilities.  Undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows must not only learn to apply and interpret the data generated with these techniques, but they must also operate the instrumentation and design measurement protocols tailored to the systems being studied.  Indeed one cannot be considered a complete materials scientist or engineer without developing such skills.  Moreover one cannot expect employment in technological industries without a significant level of understanding of both materials and materials characterization techniques.  Conversely, one cannot expect local industry to flourish without ready access to trained graduates who are savvy in materials characterization.  From an educational standpoint, one might naively suspect that programs heavy on materials characterization would generate an army of specialists.  In truth, the physical phenomena of materials properties and measurement technologies encountered spur a broader range of understanding than under the older paradigm of home-built apparatus and focused application.  Thus today’s research enterprise is a happy development from both practical and philosophical perspectives.

Maintaining a materials characterization facility requires much more than grants.  The principal means of meeting costs are user fees for instrumentation and staff.  Moreover, in the CharFac roughly a third of current user-fee based income derives from external users, primarily industrial clients from approximately 50 companies (in a typical year) ranging from small, local companies to multinational corporations.  (This activity is charged at higher rates, consistent with the analytical services market, and comprises less than 10% of instrument/staff time.)  This industrial-user base grew during the CIE years via its member companies.  The current Industrial Partnership for Research in Interfacial and Materials Engineering (IPRIME) is the successor to the industrial part of the CIE, and its members continue to use the CharFac at modestly discounted charge rates.  In turn, IPRIME serves as a vehicle to market the CharFac to industry.  IPRIME members also may include "industrial fellows" who collaborate directly with faculty on publishable research at the sharply reduced academic charge rates in the CharFac.

"Usage" by industrial clients may involve either materials analysis performed by CharFac staff or independent, hands-on use following training.  When analysis is provided it helps to grow a broader expertise in materials characterization within the staff, which adds to the intellectual assets of the university and thereby impacts academic research programs.  Hands-on training is also especially important from a practical standpoint, because the income to cover operations costs cannot be generated solely via analytical work performed by the staff. Staff effort to generate expertise, develop analytical methods and instructional materials, train users, and maintain instrumentation drives an income multiplier: trained independent users (academic and industrial).  This multiplier also enables the staff to spend time (a) teaching curricular venues ranging from a lecture-based graduate course to undergraduate lab sessions in the CharFac; (b) presiding over workshops, short courses and user meetings; and (c) providing training (at low academic charge rates) to summer internship programs like Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experiences for Teachers (RET), funded by the MRSEC.  Much of the REU activity targets underrepresented Native American college students.

Some corporate users of the CharFac have demonstrated high utility of analytical techniques, and thereby convinced their managers to purchase the same instrument.  Although this means a loss of user income to the CharFac, the instrument vendors recognize the showcase value of the CharFac.  This has resulted in massive discounts on a purchase of two new field-emission scanning electron microscopes and a nanoindentor.

It should be clear from all of the above that there is a large degree of cross-fertilization between the different kinds of activities in the CharFac.  An old presumption that "commercial activity" could somehow distort the university mission seems to be myth, at least pertaining to materials characterization facilities. Indeed one can argue just the opposite: universities applying a model like the CharFac can enhance educational opportunity and more effectively compete for faculty and student recruits, grants and infrastructure, while at the same time providing a valuable service to the local economy.  Given these outcomes, the following mission statement has been formalized: The mission of the Characterization Facility ("CharFac") relates directly to the core teaching, research and outreach missions of the University.  The CharFac mission is to:

  1. provide centrally accessible materials characterization instrumentation for University researchers, maintained and upgraded by experts;
  2. build, preserve and upgrade the knowledge and skills required for the optimal operation and research capability of the instrumentation;
  3. teach University researchers to apply the above instrumentation, knowledge and skills most fruitfully; and
  4. make the instrumentation, knowledge, skills and training available to entities external to the University of Minnesota, to a degree that does not detract from the preceding mission clauses