Exploring Frontiers in Research and Teaching: NanoEngineering and Chemical Engineering at UC San Diego.

This virtual issue of ACS Nano highlights contributions of the faculty and students of the Department of NanoEngineering and Chemical Engineering Program at the University of California, San Diego. Founded in 2007, NanoEngineering is the newest of six departments in the Jacobs School of Engineering. It comprises 26 research-active professors and a contingent of four teaching professors, whose area of focus is the core undergraduate curriculum in chemical engineering. The research interests of the department are highly interdisciplinaryit is known internationally for its strengths in nanomedicine, flexible electronics, and energy storage, with broad areas of overlap. A particular strength of the department that cuts across all research areas is computational materials science. This interdisciplinarity is, in part, a product of the diversity of the educational backgrounds of the faculty; most of us have undergraduate training in chemical engineering, chemistry, or materials science (approximately equally represented), with a smaller cohort from the field of mechanical engineering. Chemical engineering, in particular, is integral to the department and is central to its identity, with over 500 students enrolled in the undergraduate program (with a high-water mark of >200 bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineers awarded in 2017). Although UC San Diego had been offering degrees in chemical engineering since the early 1980s, the program did not have the formal support of a department until 2007. When the Department of NanoEngineering was founded, it became the logical home for chemical engineering, which was already a popular program with high undergraduate enrollment. Moreover, there is intellectual complementarity between nanoengineering and chemical engineering, with an expansive frontier between them (Figure 1). The department offers BS, MS, and PhD degrees in two programs: nanoengineering and chemical engineering. Its core strengths in research lie in the application of nanotechnology for healthcare and energy, broadly interpreted, and with many approaches represented. In the examples below, we have highlighted a few recent contributions of each of our research groups in the areas of nanomedicine, biomaterials, flexible and stretchable electronics, complex alloys and heterointerfaces, theory and computation, energy storage, nanophotonics and nanomagnetics, and photovoltaics. In the final section, we highlight our approach to teaching in chemical engineering and nanoengineering. One of our principal motivators is continuous improvement in the nanoengineering curriculum and the adoption of video in asynchronous, remote, and active learning. In this Editorial, we give the reader a preview of what is to be discovered in this virtual issue, which we believe will contain something to satisfy the curiosity of most individuals within the broad readership of ACS Nano.