Competitive research experiences give chemistry major advanced look into materials science field

Nick Manning has a deep love for trying to optimize things.

It sparked an investigative drive in the Commonwealth University-Lock Haven chemistry major while operating his own microgreens business in high school growing little plant sprouts to sell to family, friends, and teachers.

“One of the big things I did with the business was to optimize the growth rate of those sprouts to grow faster, which yielded more profit and slashed costs,” Manning said. “I became very focused in studying that process, optimizing specific processes like that to improve the effectiveness of a product.”

That interest led to Manning exploring nanofabrication, which then took him down a path into materials science — a discipline that explores the relationship between a material's structure, processing, and performance in various applications.

Today, that drive is evident in his passion for research. 

“It’s all about motivation,” Manning said. “If you're motivated about research and you tell your advisor, especially within the STEM fields, you can get a spot in the lab pretty easily here.”

It’s already been a busy year for Manning, who just in the past six months has spent time in the Southwest and upper Midwest parts of the country deep-diving into materials science. Each experience has given the rising junior a significant boost to his resume — and confidence — not just for graduate school applications but for future professional leverage as well.

“It’s shown me how to network as well as ask better research questions, especially within materials,” Manning said. “And it’s been good to see what other research-oriented students are working on. It’s almost like studying the competition, because these are likely the people who are going to be applying to the same graduate schools I’ll be applying to.”

He added, “I believe that learning how to enetwork is going to help me in the long run with research in general, because I believe it fundamentally comes down to who you know.”

This summer, Manning accepted a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) position at the University of Minnesota, where he’s working with faculty and graduate students on advanced materials research. He’s one of 25 chosen students for Minnesota’s REU program this summer.

Last year, the program featured students representing schools from 12 different states to include Baylor, Iowa State, Michigan, and Florida universities.

REU programs are competitive opportunities typically funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that bring high-achieving students together to work with research mentors on cutting-edge projects that could potentially lead to publication.

“I want to be the best, to be at the forefront,” Manning said. “To put in the time out of class applying learned and, quite often, new concepts, there's something about it I just love. I don't know how else to describe it.”

Manning kicked off this year at the University of Arizona’s iconic Biosphere 2 participating in the second annual MateriAlZ Winter School, hosted in partnership by Arizona State University and funded by the NSF. He spent four days in early January attending a series of tutorials, soft skill workshops, and panel discussions covering topics on materials science, chemistry, and engineering.

Manning also had opportunities to network with graduate students, science faculty, industry professionals, and funding agencies executives — getting insights into the latest trends and career opportunities in material science — as well as explore Biosphere 2 firsthand.

“I really find plants fascinating, and the biosphere had so many different kinds of plants from every continent,” Manning said. “It had North American native plants, African native plants, Asian native plants. It's just very interesting to see … like, I've never seen a cacao plant before. It had all these plants from Alaska down to sub-Saharan Africa growing there, thriving all in the same setting.”

Despite the uniquely busy start to this year, Manning says he’s not done traveling for research opportunities just yet.

“Next summer, I'll be applying to national labs,” said Manning, adding NASA is one of his targets. "I'm going to continue to work and see if I can earn a spot in some of the country’s most competitive programs. Wherever this leads, it'll be because I gave it everything I had."