Current societal global challenges we face include determining ways in which to promote affordable healthcare to combat infectious diseases, especially in low resource settings, finding access to clean water, understanding the human brain, identifying cheap, renewable energy sources to meet our ever increasing demand for energy, understanding climate change, and inventing electronics beyond Moore's Law. These are just some examples of topics that require experts from diverse disciplines working together to address such societal grand challenges. The PTI will engage experts from various disciplines to work together on such open questions and to discuss possible solutions through interdisciplinary collaborations and bringing wide perspectives to the table, relevant to the area of Nanomaterials and Microsystems Technology. The PTI-affiliated faculty have expertise in exploring the mechanical properties of materials, to investigating their use in thermal, electronic, optical, flexible and bio-related platforms, as exemplified with the symbolic image above. The students engaged with PTI will be provided opportunities to interact with those outside of their immediate disciplines through faculty-faculty, faculty-student collaborations.  The hope is that this training prepares the PTI-affiliated students to gain interdisciplinary perspectives which should prepare them well to enter an ever increasingly diverse workforce.