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| Issue
No. 7 | UCLA's Research Collaboration Newsletter
| Spring, 2004 |
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Additional Articles
At the Center of Attention: UCLA Interdisciplinary Research
New multi-million dollar research centers at UCLA connect
disciplines, industry and academia.
by
Jeyling Chou
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“Research
bridges” are being built across the UCLA campus—from
Engineering's Boelter Hall to the UCLA David Geffen School
of Medicine, from bio-nanosystems to space exploration.
An environment of faculty collaboration across the disciplines
that has been gradually cultivated over the past decade
at UCLA is starting to bear fruit.
Seven to be exact—and
counting.
Within the past several
years, seven new multi-million dollar interdisciplinary
centers have been established at UCLA through funding from
external sources. These centers are focused on the frontier
of nanotechnology, and serve to strengthen yet another bridge:
that between the lab and the marketplace.
“You can discover
something in the university lab, but it takes a long time
to bring it to industrial scale production,” said Xiang
Zhang, director of the Center for Scalable and Integrated
Nano-Manufacturing (SINAM) and professor of mechanical and
aerospace engineering. “There's a critical need to
bridge this, and bring the technology to the application.
Manufacturing is the key to achieve those goals.”
“The grand questions in science are being answered by multidisciplinary teams.”
—Janette
Miller, Director, Strategic Research Initiatives/Sciences,
UCLA |
SINAM, established
in October 2003, is funded by an award of $18 million from
the National Science Foundation over the next five years
to devise tools for the manufacturing of devices at the
miniscule level of nanometers.
With the innumerable
applications of nanotechnology in everything from medicine
to homeland security, the center focuses on creating ways
to make the technology before it can be applied.
Devices made at the
nano-level, aside from their small size, can have incredible
efficiency and specificity. Each component can be tailored
at the level of molecules to have the exact properties and
parts that are desired.
These small things will
be making very big impacts that extend beyond the UCLA campus
to influence even the national economy.
“Nanomanufacturing
is the key for the country if it is going to get back into
the manufacturing game, which is now dominated by the Asian
countries,” said Vijay Dhir, Dean of the UCLA Henry
Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS).
The Functional Engineering
Nano Architectonics Focus Center (FENA), funded by the Semiconductor
Industry Association and the Department of Defense, will
receive $13.5 million in the next three years, and as much
as $70 million in the next ten years.
Since its establishment
in August 2003, researchers at FENA are also working to
build nanoscale materials and structures for potential applications
in the semiconductor and electronics industries.
“The implications
for creating new materials and manufacturing new devices
is enormous,” said Janette Miller, the director of
UCLA's strategic research initiatives for the sciences.
“UCLA is actively involved in helping migrate the research
enterprise into a more interdisciplinary based environment.
The grand questions in science are being answered by multidisciplinary
teams.”
The Institute for Cell
Mimetic Space Exploration (CMISE), sponsored by NASA, is
hoping to answer some of the grandest of those questions—those
posed in outer space.
CMISE is working to
understand how a human cell would respond to radiation damage
in such extreme conditions as those faced by astronauts
in space.
Chih-Ming Ho, the center's
director and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering,
is working with a team of interdisciplinary researchers
to make extremely sensitive sensors that could detect down
to the level of a single molecule.
If perfected, these
so-called bio-nanosensors could also be applied to the medical
diagnosis and detection of cancers.
“We want to help
preserve the astronaut's health in a high radiation environment
and we want to apply what we have found to the health of
human kind,” Ho said.
The manufacturing of
nanotech sensors is also one focus of the Center for Embedded
Networked Sensing (CENS), established last year with an
award of $40 million over the next ten years from the National
Science Foundation.
CENS consists of a
multidisciplinary team of faculty from UCLA, USC, UC Riverside,
and the California Institute of Technology working to create
sensors tailored to collect and monitor information in a
wide variety of environments.
As the potential for
the field of nanotechnology continues to expand, so has
the interest of government organizations and private companies.
“Industry is very
involved in the development of nanotechnology, and the federal
government is making the largest commitment,” Miller
said.
Two federal organizations,
the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and
the Defense MicroElectronics Activity, have provided funding
to establish the Center for Nanoscience Innovation for Defense
(CNID).
The center has also
partnered with large players of the industry, such as Boeing,
DuPont, and Hewlett Packard, for research into the application
of nanotechnology in the defense sector.
In Dec. 2000, the groundwork
of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) launched
some of the first initiatives in nanotechnology and revolutionized
thinking in scientific fields at the molecular level.
Construction on the
CNSI building is expected to be completed on the UCLA campus
in May 2005, but faculty relationships that support the
institute have already found homes in dozens of individual
labs, and now in the new centers.
The newest headquarters
for interdisciplinary work is the UCLA Biomedical Informatics
Center (UBIC), established to revolutionize the technologies
of information gathering in disease research.
Formed as a collaboration
between HSSEAS and the School of Medicine, UBIC will investigate
the entire range of applied information acquisition—from
cells to populations, computer language to human words.
As the centers continue
to accumulate, they will bring to the university not only
an increased drive for interdisciplinary cooperation, but
also prestige.
“We are encouraging
professors to move outside of their departments and work
with faculty from different departments,” Dhir said.
“We are creating new technologies so we will take the
lead.”
The existence of these
centers is a result of the tireless effort of UCLA faculty
to collaborate and submit proposals to funding organizations
in an extremely competitive process.
“It is very difficult
to get these centers,” Dhir said. “It reflects
on the faculty's creativity and their vision, it reflects
the outstanding students we have, and our ability to perform
and deliver.”
 
Related Links
CENS - www.cens.ucla.edu
CNID - www.engineer.ucla.edu/stories/2002/cnid.htm
CMISE - www.cmise.ucla.edu
CNSI - www.cnsi.ucla.edu
FENA - overview
SINAM - www.sinam.ucla.edu
UBIC - www.engineeringalum.ucla.edu/magazine/ubic.asp
UCLA Directory of Labs - www.research.ucla.edu/labs
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