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How your Donation Supports BIMR
The world’s population relies on materials for its survival on a daily basis. We continually encounter new materials that improve our lives and enable us to reach new frontiers of exploration. Whether it’s the hydrogel contact lens that helps us see, the titanium and polyethylene joint replacement that helps us walk, the copper interconnects in our microprocessors that help us perform calculations, or the carbon fiber composites in the heat shield that enables space craft to land on Mars, constant improvement to new materials is required for future advancement.
However, materials can also be the source of challenging problems that humanity must face. Millions of tonnes of plastic waste are filling our landfills and polluting our oceans. We use enormous amounts of energy and fossil fuels to produce the silicon, rubber, steel, and plastic that we use on a daily basis. Our internal combustion engines continue to produce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. To address these and many other challenges, we require new research in sustainable materials, biodegradable plastics, energy harvesting materials, more efficient batteries, advanced water filtration membranes, and new lower-energy production processes.
The Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research (BIMR), named after McMaster’s only Nobel Laureate, strives to build a community of researchers working together to solve these challenging problems in Materials research. We strive to support world-leading research in printed organic electronics, sustainability in materials manufacturing, development of biomaterials for drug delivery and prosthetics, energy harvesting and storage materials, design and testing of personal protective equipment, advanced filtration membrane engineering, and numerous other important areas.
This work requires collaborative effort within an interdisciplinary community of researchers that, together, achieve more than what can be done by the sum of individuals. The BIMR has spawned numerous state-of-the-art facilities, including the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy (CCEM), the Centre for Crystal Growth (CCG), and the McMaster Small Angle Neutron Scattering Facility (MacSANS), and works together with numerous other facilities and institutes on campus to provide the necessary infrastructure to its members. At its core, the institute relies on the interactions of its members to identify the critical problems we face today, mount research programs that investigate those problems, and develop future solutions. Through this effort, BIMR research groups train the next generation of materials researchers who will solve the problems we face tomorrow.
Your gift to the BIMR will not only help support the world-leading work already being done, but will also enable the creation of new programs aimed at fostering multidisciplinary collaborative research within our graduate and undergraduate student populations. Thank you for considering a gift to the BIMR.
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