EIGER is a graduate student support and training program at Virginia Tech.  The name is an acronym that stands for Exploring Interfaces through Graduate Education and Research, and is inspired by the world-famous peak in the Swiss Alps. EIGER is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program.  NSF’s IGERT programs, numbering about 140 in the United States, are administered through the Directorate for Education and Human Resources in the Division of Graduate Education (http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=DGE and http://www.igert.org).

EIGER began in the summer of 2005 at Virginia Tech, and is funded through 2010.  The program will support about 27 Ph.D. students for two to three years each during its lifetime.

As the name implies, graduate students supported by EIGER will be educated and pursue research in interface science and/or engineering in natural systems, and also in behavioral interfaces within scientific and engineering teams (see Fig. 1).  The physical and behavioral components of EIGER work as a single integrated program.

            The chemistry, physics (both classical and quantum), and mass and energy transfer that occur at interfaces give us the world as we know it.  One can categorize the materials on either side of an interface as inanimate (solids, liquids, or gases) and animate (living organisms and their biomolecular components).  One can also study interfaces from purely scientific or engineering perspectives, and both approaches can be highly informative and valuable, driven by what one hopes to learn and the application in mind.  EIGER integrates all of these factors (materials and approaches) into one system of study.

EIGER also recognizes that critical interfaces exist between scientists and engineers in teams that are forming, or have formed, to solve complex, multi-disciplinary problems.  Funding agencies today strongly encourage interdisciplinary efforts.  It is well known, anecdotally by nearly all of us, and sometimes expressed openly in the professional literature, that many technical research teams in academics fall short of their genuine intentions because research can so quickly slip back into discipline specific pigeonholes, and worse, teams that start with great promise and fanfare fall victim to a host of splintering mechanisms.  EIGER includes a full complement of behavioral specialists who study team development in academic settings today, and determine how they can best succeed.

Figure 1.  The many faces of interface science and engineering, from macroscale to nanoscale