Achievement

EIGER PI Hochella and EIGER affiliated faculty Marr and Vikesland lead the Virginia Tech portion of a four-university interdisciplinary collaboration to win an NSF competition for a national Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT). Only two national centers were selected out of 39 proposals. One was the UCLA-UCSB center, and the other the Duke-Virginia Tech-Howard University-Carnegie Mellon center. Hochella was one of four co-PIs on the proposal. EIGER was a big reason that made Virginia Tech so attractive to this CEINT consortium. The total five-year grant is $14.4M, with the opportunity to renew for an additional five years starting in 2014. The relationship between EIGER and CEINT is a natural one and is clearly mutually beneficial. Students and resources overlap to make the sum greater than the parts. Both are interface and interdisciplinary science driven, and EIGER is a key factor in the CEINT national research initiative.