A key puzzle piece fell into place today with the announcement of $1.65 million in federal funding for a joint training program involving the University of Waterloo and partners in Germany.
Support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) gives the green light to a nine-year initiative to train dozens of graduate students and help bring promising new two-dimensional materials out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.
Michael Pope is a chemical engineering professor.
Five years in the making, the collaboration involves experts at the University of Duisburg-Essen, RWTH Aachen University and eight engineering and chemistry professors at Waterloo in a project dubbed 2D-MATURE.
Through workshops, international exchanges and industry partnerships, the objective is to provide almost five dozen graduate students in Canada, and a similar number in Germany, with the know-how to scale up the production of 2D materials and make them commercially viable.
“We have found, I think, that perfect collaborative fit – and it’s the right time,” said Michael Pope, a chemical engineering professor who is leading the initiative for Waterloo. “We’re at the right research-versus-commercialization phase in 2D materials development.”
The other professors involved at Waterloo are Zhongwei Chen in chemical engineering, Na Young Kim and Irene Goldthorpe in electrical and computer engineering, Kyle Daun and Kevin Musselman in mechanical and mechatronics engineering, and German Sciaini and Rodney Smith in chemistry.
Go to Funding the future of 2D materials for the full story.