Over the course of our DMREF project, Banerjee  from Texas A&M Univ. (TAMU) and Watson from Univ. at Buffalo (UB) have mentored 10 URM undergraduate summer research interns from Univ. of Puerto Rico Cayey (UPRC), recruited from 4 materials workshops at UPRC led by Banerjee and featuring presentations from former DMREF interns. Several UPRC alumni have earned PhD degrees with us and have achieved excellent post-PhD outcomes. Luis De Jesús, TAMU PhD with Banerjee, joined UB’s Dept. of Chemistry as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2022. Natalia Rivera-González, UB PhD with Watson and TAMU postdoc with Banerjee, is now a Research Scientist at Solvay. Karoline García-Pedraza, James Vasquez, and Carlos Larriuz, former DMREF summer interns, are currently pursuing PhDs with Watson and Banerjee. The UB-TAMU-UPRC partnership was recently featured in Chemical & Engineering News.

Several graduate research students from our DMREF team, at TAMU and UB, have completed TAMU’s 2-week summer school on Computational Materials Science across Scales, which includes several modules on data science and is preceded by a weekend bootcamp in Python coding at TAMU.

Image: Top: Banerjee at the AI/ML for Materials Design workshop at the University of Puerto Rico Cayey. Bottom: DMREF interns Jorge Aponte (left) and Louis Ruiz (right) working in the laboratory.