The Renovations for Materials Characterization Service and Support of Academic Programs has as its core mission the instruction and education of undergraduate and graduate students in materials research-related fields using modern analytical instruments. The University of Alabama (UA) can affirm itself as a leading education location worldwide through a recapitalization in the proposed materials characterization equipment, where the current instruments are becoming perilously susceptible to obsolescence and experience significant downtime. Many of the instruments are approaching nearly two decades of life. Such a recapitalization will attract the best students and faculty in multiple disciplines. In doing so, UA’s core facilities will usher in the next generation of materials education and research for energy, defense, transportation, human health, and environmental sciences, all of which align with the state of Alabama’s Science and Technology Roadmap (https://alepscor.org/roadmap/).

The recapitalized instruments are used in supporting undergraduate and graduate-level courses in multiple departments and across colleges. However, the current condition of many of these instrument’s results in frequent downtime hindering reliable incorporation for teaching and supporting research programs. Furthermore, they are no longer cutting-edge, inhibiting UA from meeting its educational objectives for providing its students the highest quality of opportunities for training and education. In addition, the obsolescence of the instrument’s places UA at a disadvantage to its peer institutions in proposing and winning new research grants and contracts that support student education as they can no longer match what many others can propose.

The renewal itself would expand educational and research horizons on and off-campus. Through modern remote access availability offered by these modern instruments, coupled with renovations to make them effective in their environment, UA will be able to support UA system campuses in their educational and research pursuits creating a true core facility. The remote access will also enable ongoing outreach engagements to spark the interest of the rising generation of Alabamian students in K-12 classrooms. Here, teachers that now come to the UA campus to learn how to incorporate materials into their physical science, chemistry, and physics courses will have microscopes that can stream ‘live’ images into their classes. These interactions give UA an edge in recruiting future students.

Collectively, the renewal initiative offers the infrastructure to ensure UA’s preeminent leadership in education and research to support the state’s growing workforce needs, evident in the burgeoning aerospace and defense employers in Huntsville, for example. Renewal of this scale will have a generational impact on the scope of education, research, and facility capabilities unmatched in the southeast region and nation.