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About the #NUforNE Series: This article is part of the University of Nebraska's #NUforNE series. #NUforNE features students, faculty, staff and alumni from across the University who are making an impact on Nebraska.

A technology revolution is here. Across the nation, employers are reshaping their workforces to accommodate new needs and goalsmost of them related to tech. Companies are hiring more workers with technical expertise to help with strategy and innovation.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that computer and mathematical jobs will increase at the second-fastest rate of any other field over the next decade. In that same span, it estimates that data scientists and information security analysts will be among the ten fastest-growing occupations and software developers will produce the third-largest jobs increase of any occupation.

Business leaders across Nebraska are looking to raise the states tech profile.

This next generation goes where the technology jobs are, said Bryan Slone, president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry. We need to be known as a technology state.

Yet, Nebraska is facing a workforce crisis, with not enough workers to go around.

This is where the University of Nebraska at Omaha steps in. The states only metropolitan university, it works hand-in-hand with business partners in Nebraskas largest city. Its College of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) educates students in computer science, cybersecurity, information systems, data analytics and other tech disciplines. IS&T works closely with Omaha companies on hiring students for full-time and internship positions, filling the tech workforce pipeline with UNO graduates.

Dr. Martha Garcia-Murillo is the dean of the College of Information Science & Technology. She exudes a calm but strong presence and a passion for the students in her college.

Garcia-Murillo received her doctoral degree in economics and political economy at the University of Southern California.

When she was applying for her Ph.D. at USC, the family she was providing childcare for saw her filling out scholarship paperwork. They told her, Martha, if you dont get a scholarship, we will fund you. The family eventually paid for her first year of graduate school, creating a major impact on Garcia-Murillo.

She is now focused on providing scholarships for IS&T students.

I think that it's important to be able to provide scholarship opportunities to studentsit can make a huge difference in their lives. It did in mine, Garcia-Murillo said.

The Omaha community includes many students who are economically disadvantaged or are the first in their family to go to college. Without scholarships, academically accomplished students may need to work to support themselves. If they are working at retail restaurants or coffeeshops, it reduces the opportunities for internships that allow them to lead projects, get engaged in a professional organization, and build an outstanding resume.

I want them to substitute their non-IT job for an IT job, Garcia-Murillo said. When they graduate, they should leave with resumes that help them get the very best jobs.

Garcia-Murillo is focused on experiences that build students professional portfolios. She has developed a unique program, Learn and Earn, which takes an IS&T student through four years of job experience during their time at the college.

First-year students take a one-credit class where they participate in three job shadows. Their second year, they engage in micro-internshipsshort projects between five and 35 hours that are paid. And their third and fourth years, they have paid internships the entire year.

My objective is to create a learning community for the entire IS&T student body, Garcia-Murillo said. Learn and Earn ensures that were offering experiential opportunities to everyone.

Dr. Levi Thiele, UNOs director of career development, is excited about Learn to Earnwhich she describes as combining career-oriented curriculum, employer-based experiential learning and financial assistance.

Students learn through their preparation for successful careers. They earn payment for their work, which improves equity and access to experiential learning opportunities, she said.

Experiential learning is the process of learning by doing. By engaging IS&T students in hands-on experiences and reflection, they are better able to connect theories and knowledge learned in the classroom to real-world situations.

Were preparing students to be independent thinkers, to be professionally minded, to be in leadership positions, to be discerning and make good judgments, Garcia-Murillo said.

Job shadowing, micro-internships and internships also familiarize students with companies in the Omaha area.

When you graduate students with real-life experience, its more likely that theyll be placed into our local economy if theyve had encounters with local companies or projects, Garcia-Murillo said.

The college completed a survey with students who took the first-year seminar class, asking them, What companies do you want to work for after you graduate? More than 100 students answered the question, but only 10 students were able to identify Nebraska companies.

Employers are concerned about students leaving Nebraska. But many of our students don't actually understand the opportunities they have here, Garcia-Murillo said. Everything we're building in the college is intended to ground them to Nebraska and expose them to more companies.

UNO is a metropolitan university. A large majority of the student body comes from non-traditional backgrounds; many are supporting families.

Our student body comes from an underserved community with very little economic support, said Dr. Joanne Li, UNOs chancellor.

A college degree not only makes a difference for IS&T graduates, it also makes a difference for their families and their communities. Upon graduation, 78% of IS&T graduates are employed in their field of study and earn a median salary of $75,000.

UNOs values of strengthening the community through collaboration and partnershipsand improving Omahas quality of lifeis at the heart of IS&T's Learn and Earn.

The tech field is promising for disadvantaged students in many ways. Not only do they grow personally, but they earn an income that allows them to break out of povertynot only for themselves, but their families and their communities, Garcia-Murillo said. There are ripple effects that go beyond the individual and their job.

The Learn and Earn program meets three of UNOs strategic goalsstudent success, workforce development and social mobility, Thiele said.

Martha Garcia-Murillo and the team at IS&T have been visionaries. They have intentionally and thoughtfully structured the Learn and Earn program to meet student and workforce needs.

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#NUforNE: Supporting the Tech Revolution | News - University of Nebraska Omaha

Emerging AI applications, like chatbots that generate natural human language, demand denser, more powerful computer chips. But semiconductor chips are traditionally made with bulk materials, which are boxy 3D structures, so stacking multiple layers of transistors to create denser integrations is very difficult.

However, semiconductor transistors made from ultrathin 2D materials, each only about three atoms in thickness, could be stacked up to create more powerful chips. To this end, MIT researchers have now demonstrated a novel technology that can effectively and efficiently "grow" layers of 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials directly on top of a fully fabricated silicon chip to enable denser integrations.

Growing 2D materials directly onto a silicon CMOS wafer has posed a major challenge because the process usually requires temperatures of about 600 degrees Celsius, while silicon transistors and circuits could break down when heated above 400 degrees. Now, the interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers has developed a low-temperature growth process that does not damage the chip. The technology allows 2D semiconductor transistors to be directly integrated on top of standard silicon circuits.

In the past, researchers have grown 2D materials elsewhere and then transferred them onto a chip or a wafer. This often causes imperfections that hamper the performance of the final devices and circuits. Also, transferring the material smoothly becomes extremely difficult at wafer-scale. By contrast, this new process grows a smooth, highly uniform layer across an entire 8-inch wafer.

The new technology is also able to significantly reduce the time it takes to grow these materials. While previous approaches required more than a day to grow a single layer of 2D materials, the new approach can grow a uniform layer of TMD material in less than an hour over entire 8-inch wafers.

Due to its rapid speed and high uniformity, the new technology enabled the researchers to successfully integrate a 2D material layer onto much larger surfaces than has been previously demonstrated. This makes their method better-suited for use in commercial applications, where wafers that are 8 inches or larger are key.

"Using 2D materials is a powerful way to increase the density of an integrated circuit. What we are doing is like constructing a multistory building. If you have only one floor, which is the conventional case, it won't hold many people. But with more floors, the building will hold more people that can enable amazing new things. Thanks to the heterogenous integration we are working on, we have silicon as the first floor and then we can have many floors of 2D materials directly integrated on top," says Jiadi Zhu, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student and co-lead author of a paper on this new technique.

Zhu wrote the paper with co-lead-author Ji-Hoon Park, an MIT postdoc; corresponding authors Jing Kong, professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory for Electronics; and Toms Palacios, professor of EECS and director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL); as well as others at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Ericsson Research. The paper appears today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Slim materials with vast potential

The 2D material the researchers focused on, molybdenum disulfide, is flexible, transparent, and exhibits powerful electronic and photonic properties that make it ideal for a semiconductor transistor. It is composed of a one-atom layer of molybdenum sandwiched between two atoms of sulfide.

Growing thin films of molybdenum disulfide on a surface with good uniformity is often accomplished through a process known as metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Molybdenum hexacarbonyl and diethylene sulfur, two organic chemical compounds that contain molybdenum and sulfur atoms, vaporize and are heated inside the reaction chamber, where they "decompose" into smaller molecules. Then they link up through chemical reactions to form chains of molybdenum disulfide on a surface.

But decomposing these molybdenum and sulfur compounds, which are known as precursors, requires temperatures above 550 degrees Celsius, while silicon circuits start to degrade when temperatures surpass 400 degrees.

So, the researchers started by thinking outside the box -- they designed and built an entirely new furnace for the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition process.

The oven consists of two chambers, a low-temperature region in the front, where the silicon wafer is placed, and a high-temperature region in the back. Vaporized molybdenum and sulfur precursors are pumped into the furnace. The molybdenum stays in the low-temperature region, where the temperature is kept below 400 degrees Celsius -- hot enough to decompose the molybdenum precursor but not so hot that it damages the silicon chip.

The sulfur precursor flows through into the high-temperature region, where it decomposes. Then it flows back into the low-temperature region, where the chemical reaction to grow molybdenum disulfide on the surface of the wafer occurs.

"You can think about decomposition like making black pepper -- you have a whole peppercorn and you grind it into a powder form. So, we smash and grind the pepper in the high-temperature region, then the powder flows back into the low-temperature region," Zhu explains.

Faster growth and better uniformity

One problem with this process is that silicon circuits typically have aluminum or copper as a top layer so the chip can be connected to a package or carrier before it is mounted onto a printed circuit board. But sulfur causes these metals to sulfurize, the same way some metals rust when exposed to oxygen, which destroys their conductivity. The researchers prevented sulfurization by first depositing a very thin layer of passivation material on top of the chip. Then later they could open the passivation layer to make connections.

They also placed the silicon wafer into the low-temperature region of the furnace vertically, rather than horizontally. By placing it vertically, neither end is too close to the high-temperature region, so no part of the wafer is damaged by the heat. Plus, the molybdenum and sulfur gas molecules swirl around as they bump into the vertical chip, rather than flowing over a horizontal surface. This circulation effect improves the growth of molybdenum disulfide and leads to better material uniformity.

In addition to yielding a more uniform layer, their method was also much faster than other MOCVD processes. They could grow a layer in less than an hour, while typically the MOCVD growth process takes at least an entire day.

Using the state-of-the-art MIT.Nano facilities, they were able to demonstrate high material uniformity and quality across an 8-inch silicon wafer, which is especially important for industrial applications where bigger wafers are needed.

"By shortening the growth time, the process is much more efficient and could be more easily integrated into industrial fabrications. Plus, this is a silicon-compatible low-temperature process, which can be useful to push 2D materials further into the semiconductor industry," Zhu says.

In the future, the researchers want to fine-tune their technique and use it to grow many stacked layers of 2D transistors. In addition, they want to explore the use of the low-temperature growth process for flexible surfaces, like polymers, textiles, or even papers. This could enable the integration of semiconductors onto everyday objects like clothing or notebooks.

This work is partially funded by the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, Ericsson, MITRE, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The project also benefitted from the support of TSMC University Shuttle.

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From early detection and internal treatment of diseases to futuristic applications like augmenting human memory, biological computing, or biocomputing, has the potential to revolutionize medicine and computers. Traditional computer hardware is limited in its ability to interface with living organs, which has constrained the development of medical devices. Computerized implants require a constant supply of electricity, they can cause scarring in soft tissue that makes them unusable and they cannot heal themselves the way organisms can. Through the use of biological molecules such as DNA or proteins, biocomputing has the potential to overcome these limitations.

Biocomputing is typically done either with live cells or with non-living, enzyme-free molecules. Live cells can feed themselves and can heal, but it can be difficult to redirect cells from their ordinary functions towards computation. Non-living molecules solve some of the problems of live cells, but have weak output signals and are difficult to fine-tune and regulate.

In new research published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has developed a platform for a third method of biocomputing: Trumpet, or Transcriptional RNA Universal Multi-Purpose GatE PlaTform.

Trumpet uses biological enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing. Researchers performed logic gate operations, similar to operations done by all computers, in test tubes using DNA molecules. A positive gate connection resulted in a phosphorescent glow. The DNA creates a circuit, and a fluorescent RNA compound lights up when the circuit is completed, just like a lightbulb when a circuit board is tested.

The research team demonstrated that:

Trumpet is a non-living molecular platform, so we don't have most of the problems of live cell engineering, said co-author Kate Adamala, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. We don't have to overcome evolutionary limitations against forcing cells to do things they don't want to do. This also gives Trumpet more stability and reliability, with our logic gates avoiding the leakage problems of live cell operations.

While Trumpet is still in early experimental stages, it has tremendous potential in the future. It could make a lot of long-term neural implants possible. The applications could range from strictly medical, like healing damaged nerve connections or controlling prosthetics, to more sci-fi applications like entertainment or learning and augmented memory, said Adamala.

Lead author and Ph.D. candidate Judee Sharon is using Trumpet to develop biomedical applications for early diagnosis of cancer. Another possible application is theranostics combined medical diagnostics and therapeutics inside the body. For instance, a biological circuit could detect low insulin levels in a diabetes patient and activate proteins to manufacture the needed insulin. This kind of device could be small enough to circulate in the bloodstream of a patient.

The research is a joint project by the Department of Genetics, Cellular Biology, and Development at the College of Biological Science and the Department of Computer Science at the College of Science and Engineering.

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