The Primarily Undergraduate Nanomaterials Cooperative: A New Model for Supporting Collaborative Research at Small Institutions on a National Scale.

The Primarily Undergraduate Nanomaterials Cooperative (PUNC) is an organization for research-active faculty studying nanomaterials at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), where undergraduate teaching and research go hand-in-hand. In this perspective, we outline the differences in maintaining an active research group at a PUI compared to an R1 institution. We also discuss the work of PUNC, which focuses on community building, instrument sharing, and facilitating new collaborations. Currently consisting of 37 members from across the United States, PUNC has created an online community consisting of its Web site (nanocooperative.org), a weekly online summer group meeting program for faculty and students, and a Discord server for informal conversations. Additionally, in-person symposia at ACS conferences and PUNC-specific conferences are planned for the future. It is our hope that in the years to come PUNC will be seen as a model organization for community building and research support at primarily undergraduate institutions.

Teaching from the primary inorganic literature: lessons from Richard Andersen.

For many who passed through his classroom, Richard Andersen demonstrated how inorganic chemistry can be taught by incorporating the research literature. The Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC) through its website and summer workshops for faculty has supported the development and sharing of more than a hundred exercises or "learning objects" derived from articles highlighting research across the inorganic field. Faculty can adapt and implement these learning objects in their own classrooms to achieve goals such as demonstrating historical context, teaching course material via current research, and elaborating on the scientific process. Literature discussion learning objects highlight current and past research in inorganic chemistry and teach students both chemistry content and how the body of inorganic knowledge is constructed.

Suspensions of nickel nanowires as magneto-optical switches.

Application of modest magnetic fields can be used to control the direction in which laser light incident on aqueous suspensions of magnetic Ni nanowires ( approximately 200 nm in diameter and approximately 10 microm in length) is preferentially scattered. Similar effects were observed for suspensions of these nanowires prepared in ethanol, ethylene glycol, and glycerol. In glycerol, the nanowires settle sufficiently slowly that the effects can be quantified. In particular, fields of the order of 100 Oe cause the intensity of light scattered in the forward direction to vary by as much as a factor of thirty-five simply by changing the direction of the field.