Juana Moreno receives $2.5 million NSF grant The University of North Dakota has received notification from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that Juana Moreno, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, has received a $2.5 million dollar grant award to establish a new international graduate education program related to computational materials science research. The project will create an integrated research and doctoral education program that leverages the resources of NSF-supported high performance computing infrastructure at UND, several foreign and domestic universities as well as a federal laboratory. This collaboration provides a unique opportunity for physics doctoral students to explore the physical properties of high tech materials by interacting with and taking advantage of the high performance computing capabilities at partner universities and laboratories around the world. In addition to providing a diverse and rich educational environment for graduate students and making them more competitive in the global marketplace, this work could result in new future high-tech devices. "This grant is another great example of the synergy that can result from collaboration among faculty in the sciences and the humanities," said Martha Potvin, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "Our students will be able to work in the laboratories of experts from around the world and they will also benefit from their peer national and international colleagues. These will be life-changing experiences for our students and I am optimistic that their work and discoveries will be life changing for society in the future.I am proud of Dr. Moreno and her colleagues for developing such an innovative approach to graduate education." The project represents a partnership between researchers at UND, the University of Cincinnati, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S.; the University of Bremen, the Max Planck Institute of Solid State Research, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Göttingen in Germany; and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich in Switzerland.