The Center is committed to supporting the involvement of women and underrepresented minorities to the engineering programs. Working closely with AGEP and the Alliance for Minority participation, undergraduates are hosted in our laboratories to obtain research experience. Furthermore, the Center offers demo sessions, presentations and other activities aiming to attract high school students to engineering. Similarly, working together with the WISE initiative and the Society of Women Engineers programs, many hands-on lab sessions on the electron microscopes have been provided for female students of the University. One of the success stories of attracting female student interest in physical and biological sciences is Katarzyna Sawicka who was selected as a finalist in the 2004 Collegiate Inventors Competition for her undergraduate research on polymer-enzyme nanocomposites and she has now completed her Master¡¦s thesis and moved on to Ph.D. studies.