About

The Garcia Research Scholars Program is an interdisciplinary research program that brings together students and faculty from diverse fields where fundamental scientific knowledge serves as an enabling technology for solving important real-world challenges. Research areas include medicine, pharmacology, dentistry, tissue engineering, materials design, energy generation and storage, mathematical modeling, computation, and many other topics that emerge through collaboration and scientific discovery.

One of our goals each summer is to advance research projects to a level where students can submit abstracts to the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting, one of the world's premier scientific conferences. Through the MRS "hot topic" sessions, students have the opportunity to present their work alongside researchers from leading universities, national laboratories, and industries across the globe.

Abstracts are evaluated by experts in the field and selected based on their scientific significance, originality, technical quality, and relevance to the session topic. Having an abstract accepted is not merely participation in a competition; it is recognition by the scientific community that the work makes a meaningful and novel contribution to advancing a particular discipline.

To provide a sense of the caliber and breadth of student research in the Garcia Program, click on the image below to view the abstracts that were selected for either poster or oral presentation in the various MRS sessions in 2025.