Small Times - Brown U launches Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation

May 15, 2008 -- About one year ago, the Brown Corporation voted to establish a campus-wide multi-disciplinary nanosciences institute at Brown University. This month, the Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation (IMNI) opened with a celebratory launch event next featuring luminaries from academia, government, and industry including Mike Roco, the National Science Foundation's senior advisor for nanotechnology; and Harvard University's Charles Lieber, who has been active in nanotechnology research and commercialization. "We've been building basic infrastructure and personnel over the last nine months," says Dr. Robert H. Hurt, who serves as IMNI's director and also runs the Laboratory for Innovation in Nanostructured Carbon. "We have 55 faculty affiliates spanning 9 departments on campus including the physical, life, and social sciences. We are not a center with a single theme, but rather an institute with multiple themes and containing multiple block grants and centers."

Inside IMNI is the Center for Advanced Materials Research, which focuses on the nano- and micromechanics of materials. The institute also encompasses the new Center for Nanoscience and Soft Matter, with activities in sensing, molecular electronics, nanomagnetics, and supramolecular chemistry. The NanoHealth Working Group represents the institute's third major theme: It focuses on environmental and health nanosciences -- nano EHS and nanomedicine. "NanoHealth is a marriage of materials scientists and biologists working in an integrated way to develop safe nanomaterials to help foster the responsible development of nanotechnology," says Hurt.

Hurt told the Providence Journal, the newspaper covering Brown's Rhode Island hometown, that in any given semester, hundreds of Brown students are enrolled in nano-related courses. And, he said, he hopes that Brown's work can spawn more businesses -- and jobs -- in the state. One such firm, Solaris Nanosciences, of Providence, is a Brown University spin-off.

IMNI's homepage presents examples of current projects underway (among them "nanopatterning techniques key to discovery of Cooper pairs in insulators", "bioavailability of nickel in single-wall carbon nanotues," and "time dependent deformation behavior in nanoscale crack-tips." And among Brown University's sponsored projects, highlighted under research, are Micro- and Nanomechanics of Materials, an NSF-sponsored Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (ERC); From Atoms to Autos, a General Motors / Brown Collaborative Research Laboratory on Computational Materials Science; and Micropatterned Nanotopography Chips for Probing the Cellular Basis of Toxicity and Biocompatibility, an NSF-sponsored Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant.

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