The Illinois Plasma Institute (IPI) is an initiative of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. IPI’s founding was driven by a desire to rethink existing path ways to commercialization of new technologies developed in academic research settings. Combining the best of both worlds, IPI provides a space where forward thinking industrial partners are able to pair their own research and development staff with academic researchers closer to the underlying science behind a new technology. Working in concert on a shared platform, advances made it the laboratory may be implemented onto production level equipment shortening the time to adoption in high volume manufacturing.
Complementary to cooperation in the lab, assignees from industrial partners also find easy access to the College’s Masters of Engineering in Plasma Engineering, a professional Masters program designed to prepare workers from a wide variety of technical fields for the unique opportunities that plasma processing has to offer.