Brown University Wins $6.25 Million MURI grant from Army Research Office

Brown and Cal State Northridge are teaming up on a $6.25 million Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Army Research Office (ARO) to study “Stress Controlled Catalysis via Engineering Nanostructures”. The five-year project will be led by principal investigator Bill Curtin, with collaborators Pradeep Guduru and Sharvan Kumar in the School of Engineering, Shouheng Sun in Chemistry and Engineering, and Gang Lu in Physics at Cal State Northridge. Four graduate students and six postdocs will join the faculty in executing the research.

Professor Bill Curtin '81

“This new award contributes to the growing portfolio of engineering research at Brown in the energy and nanosciences fields,” said Dean Larry Larson. “These new fields are changing the way we live in thousands of different ways. Congratulations to all the faculty, post-docs, staff and students involved in these successful efforts.”

The goal of the research is to demonstrate that macroscopic applied mechanical loading can be used to actively control and tune catalytic reactions through the use of innovative nanoscale material systems.


The challenge lies in obtaining stresses in the catalytic metal materials that are large enough to significantly influence the rates of selected chemical reactions in an overall catalytic process.

Associate Professor Pradeep Guduru

Professor Sharvan Kumar

Brown researchers will accomplish this by creating ultra-strong nanostructured materials in novel geometries where the mechanical load can be controlled and varied, also serving to isolate strain as the only experimental variable.

If the principle is demonstrated, then it may be possible to increase catalytic efficiencies by using time-varying stresses to actively control the reactions during operation, opening up the field of catalysis to an entirely new space of materials design.

Kumar selected for keynote

Professor Sharvan Kumar will deliver the Keynote Lecture in the symposium, Modeling and Deformation Behavior of Non-Cubic Metals at the JSME Materials and Mechanics Conference 2009, July 24-26, 2009 in Sapporo, Japan.

The conference details are presented here: http://www.jsme.or.jp/conference/mmdconf09-2/index.html

Kumar's recent accomplishments

Professor Sharvan Kumar's recent accomplishments:

1) Invited Speaker: DPG (German Physics Society) Spring Meeting; Metal and Material Physics Division, Dresden Germany, March 22-27, 2009.

2) Invited as an Internal Evaluator for : The Inter-Max-Planck Institutes Research Program, "The Nature of Laves Phases" March 16-March 24, 2009, Germany.

3) Awarded the JSPS Fellowship (Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship) by the Government of Japan to visit Japan for a month to give multiple seminars etc. Will be hosted by Tohoku University. Period July 15 - August 15, 2009.

4) Keynote Speaker for the Symposium "Metals and Intermetallics for High Temperature Applications" at Euromat 2009 --The Federation of European Materials Societies, to be help Sept 07-10, 2009.