Mission

Functional and Regenerative Materials Science is a highly active, diverse and interdisciplinary area of basic, applied, and translational research. Over the past 50 years, new materials have permeated virtually every aspect of society, revolutionizing our communication, transportation, agricultural and healthcare sectors. As a result, we are becoming increasingly dependent on materials, while consuming them at an ever-expanding rate. Assuming that current trends in world population growth continue, materials requirements for the next fifteen years are projected to equal all the materials used throughout history to date. This expanding use of materials is itself revolutionary, and is an integral part of the “materials revolution” of our time. The responsibility to address unmet materials needs in a humane, sustainable, energy efficient and ecologically responsible manner results in new critical challenges for materials science.

Regenerative science, based on functional materials, has the potential to revolutionize not only medical treatments and environmental remediation, but also energy storage or conversion devices. At the interface of biology with materials, new opportunities will be found to address the ongoing challenges in medicine and biology. Controlling material properties at multiple length scales in hybrid (or heterogeneous) interfaces requires expertise in a wide range of scientific areas, ranging from bio- to electrical engineering, solid-state chemistry as well as physics.

The UIC Institute for Functional and Regenerative Materials (IFRM) builds on the existing, yet isolated centers of excellence in i) functional materials imaging, and ii) biomaterials. These complementary strengths focus on developing the materials systems of tomorrow. IFRM fosters the collaborative work of otherwise siloed researchers across colleges. Our mission is to create and grow collaborations between these medical, engineering and physical science research groups to accelerate, advance and apply the discovery of materials with direct applications to improving our lives, environment and health. As such, the research of the institute is defined in two thrusts — i) functional imaging and ii) functional biomaterials — with each thrust supporting up to two pilot grants per year. The specific research program of each pilot is developed by members of the institute in coordination with the IFRM leadership team. Within the first 6-12 months, meetings and a pilot grant competition will be held to identify the most promising collaborative research projects. Ideal projects will leverage the existing strengths of UIC units, lead to discoveries that are not achievable without the institute’s support, and will be highly likely to lead to external grant support.

The Functional Imaging thrust will also provide unprecedented characterization capabilities to the Functional Biomaterials thrust, which in turn will inform the development of novel capabilities to target specific scientific questions relevant to the second thrust.