1. MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach activities MRSEC contributions to education involving the industrial sector Undergraduate/graduate/postdoc collaborating with industry Lifelong learning and skill building for industrial scientists and engineers Challenges: intellectual property, retention of technical contacts Best practices vary by research area Survey years: 2002-2004 18 of 27 MRSECs reporting (November 2004) MRSEC Industrial Partners (358 total) Large (> $100 million): 187 Medium (> $10 - $100 million): 69 Small (< $10 million): 102

2. MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach activities Survey years: 2002 - 2004 90 workshops and symposia involving more than 3600 industrial participants Collaborative research with industry - 93 MRSEC undergraduates - 228 graduate students/postdocs Effective leveraging and two-way knowledge exchange Early student exposure to the industrial sector Most students supported by a combination of MRSEC and industrial funds Graduate students and postdocs performing collaborative research with industrial partners(228 total)

3. Spintronics and Information Technology An Electronic Pump for Nuclear Spins Spin-polarized electrons (orange spheres) tunnel through the barrier separating ferromagnetic iron (orange) from a semiconductor (gray). Once inside the semiconductor, the electrons transfer their spin to nuclei (gray spheres). Magnetics Heterostructures IRG at the University of Minnesota A spin-based storage information device that combines a material ordinarily used for information storage (iron) with a common semiconductor (gallium arsenide). Significant advance: electron spin - the property that carries information - is retained when it passes into the semiconductor. Ordinarily this information, often referred to as spin polarization, decays in roughly one-billionth of a second. In this new device the electrons transfer their spin to the nuclei that form the cores of atoms in the semiconductor. Unlike the electrons, the nuclei can retain their spin for many minutes, after which their spin can be read by electrons. This type of read/write device therefore can allow nuclear spin to be used as a processing element in computer. [J. Strand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 036602 (2003).] University of Minnesota MRSEC

4. Polymersomes: Tough Vesicles Made from Diblock Copolymers A joint effort between the University of Minnesota and University of Pennsylvania MRSECs Giant polymersomes 10x tougher than lipid vesicles Less permeable to water than typical phospholipid bilayers Storage vehicles for reagents; candidates for targeted drug delivery Amphiphilic block copolymer = lipid-like bilayer Science, 1999, 284, 1143 Vesicle immediately after electroformation After encapsulation of 10-kD Texas Red-labeled dextran