Winter 2006
In This Issue:
Focus On Electronic Materials
Director’s Message
Materials discovery and development hold a central place in the technological revolutions that have reshaped our world over the last fifty years. From the silicon chips that allow high speed computing to the manmade materials that are shrinking our cell phones to medical devices that keep our hearts beating, materials research is fundamental to our health, our national security, and our economic competitiveness.
Penn State University is the nation’s twelfth largest research university, and the number one university in the nation for funding in advanced materials research. The materials community at Penn State is internationally recognized for educational programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, for outstanding interdisciplinary research, for technology transfer to industry, and for professional leadership in the materials field. These strengths provide a foundation for meeting the challenges, both technological and economic, confronting the Commonwealth and the Nation.
It is our goal to leverage Penn State’s strength in materials research for state and regional economic development. With Focus on Materials we hope to highlight the number of ways that materials research, especially Penn State’s, is benefiting industry through technology transfer and product improvement. In addition, we will feature the specialized facilities and educational programs available to industry at Penn State. In this way, we can help to improve the performance of existing companies in the region through collaborative research and development. We can help companies re-invent themselves through education about, for example, nanotechnology, computational materials design, or cyber-infrastructure. And, we can help to attract new companies to the state and the region using our faculty discoveries and superbly trained workforce.
To further leverage our materials strengths, Penn State is in the design stages of construction on a new $80M building for interdisciplinary materials research. Because this building will also serve as the anchor for technology-based economic development in the I-99 Keystone Innovation Zone and throughout the Commonwealth, Governor Rendell contributed $40M of the cost. This building will bring together a broad distribution of interdisciplinary materials researchers and state-of-the-art facilities to the Penn State campus. It will include facilities for prototyping and translational research with industry. The new materials building will be adjacent to another new $40M building for the life sciences, and thereby will facilitate the integration of materials research, science, and engineering in biology and medicine. This $120M investment in new infrastructure, together with our interdisciplinary research strengths in material science and life science, offers special opportunities to grow new companies or re-invent existing companies in healthcare and related industries. The article in this Bulletin about our recent Crossover Conference will reveal Penn State’s commitment to promote collaboration at this scientific interface, and the technological accomplishments and commercial successes of the materials and life scientists who work at that interface.
We hope you find benefit in this materials research Bulletin. It is designed and written with you in mind. If you would like to suggest a specific topic, contact one of the editors. And if you see an opportunity to leverage our strengths in materials to assist your company, we do want to hear from you. We have all the mechanisms in place in our Industrial Research Office to engage you, and in the Materials Research Institute to technically assist you.
To access the materials expertise at Penn State, please visit our Materials Research Institute web site at www.mri.psu.edu, or the Industrial Research Office web site at www.techtransfer.psu.edu/iro/.
Sincerely,
Carlo Pantano
Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
