Shared Facilities at IMRI
Established in 2015, Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI) is a 20,000 ft2 facility that serves as UCI’s cross-campus materials research characterization nexus. UCI has invested substantially in the last 5 years to establish a premier Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) facility, now fully functional. IMRI operates a wide range of state-of-the-art, open-access user facilities for characterizing inorganic, organic, and biological materials from the sub-angstrom to macroscopic length scales. The UCI MRSEC will be integrated with these shared facilities, for which MRSEC faculty provide scientific and managerial leadership. The PI, Xiaoqing Pan, is IMRI’s inaugural director, and MRSEC faculty, Huolin Xin, William Bowman, and Joe Patterson, are members of IMRI’s Faculty Advisory Board. Many MRSEC faculty are core users of these facilities. The University supports the salary of the administrative staff and the 6 PhD level core technical staff. Synergies between the MRSEC and the IMRI facility will ensure that strategic investments in core facilities are mutually beneficial. IMRI’s state-of-the-art instruments will be integrated into the Center’s REU and other educational programs. IMRI houses four complementary materials characterization facilities, which are open to campus, national, and international users including other universities and industries.
