|
|
| Research Units and Centers | |
 
|
HIGHLIGHTING KEY RESEARCHThe University of Texas at Austin is targeting several areas of multidisciplinary research as strategically important in developing new sciences and technologies that promise to improve the lives of those in Texas and beyond and to build and strengthen the new Texas economy. NanotechnologyThe University of Texas at Austin continues to make discoveries in nanotechnology while building the research program. In nanotechnology, scientists and engineers manipulate materials that are in the 1-100 nanometer region (one-billionth of a meter). It is regarded as the next basic technology, following information technology and biotechnology, and it has broad applications in those fields and many others. Since the late 1990s, the university’s nanotechnology research program has grown from a handful of researchers to more than 50 engaged in nano projects who have published papers ab out their nanotechnology research. Another 50 are in the process of putting nano projects together. These researchers come from departments in the colleges of natural sciences, engineering, pharmacy and liberal arts. Researchers in law, public affairs and IC are investigating other areas of nanotechnology. About 50 students are in the nanotechnology doctoral program, which began in the fall of 2004. The number of participating students is expected to double in the next few years. The program seeks to provide an efficient and effective introduction to nanotechnology to students from a wide range of technical disciplines. Nanotechnology researchers at the university are working in diverse such areas as nanomaterials for energy storage; conversion and harvesting advanced nanostructured polymers for plastic electronics; new approaches for modifying biological surfaces for medical applications; new technologies for the microelectronics industry including photonic and spintronic approaches; and a broad range of fundamental research in nanomaterials, synthesis, characterization and modeling. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, University of Texas at Austin researchers described a nanostructured catalyst made from palladium-based alloys for fuel cells. Its performance is equal to or better than the more expensive commercial platinum catalysts. Other researchers provided the first detailed molecular-level information on how the shape of the interfacing regions of solar cell materials influence the energy transferred between them. The work was published in the journal, Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English. The nanotechnology program will take a major step forward in spring 2006 when a $40 million building devoted is opened. It will provide the resources to expand the university’s nanotechnology research as well as a meeting place for the multi-disciplinary collaborators. Advanced Materials Research CenterThe university is the linchpin in the Advanced Materials Research Center (AMRC), a partnership between the university, the State of Texas and Sematech International Inc. and other Texas universities. The aim of the five-year AMRC effort is to accelerate the commercialization of research that will generate the industries, careers and tax revenue of the future. The AMRC will focus on leading-edge materials and capabilities for next-generation semiconductors, as well as cutting edge research in nanotechnology, biotechnology and other related advanced high-tech areas. “One of our primary aims in forming the AMRC is to commercialize new technology in ways that can benefit the people of Texas, by helping create the industries and jobs of the future,” said Sanjay Banerjee, technology coordinator for the AMRC and director of the Microelectronics Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Several companies that have benefited from involvement with AMRC are Molecular Imprints Inc. and Xidex Corp., based in Austin; OrganicID Inc., based in Colorado Springs, Co., and Zyvex Corp., based in Dallas. High Performance ComputingThe university’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is a leader in academic high-performance computing. More than 600 research projects are benefiting from the high performance computing resources available at TACC. These projects span multiple disciplines including the natural sciences (chemistry, physics, computer science, geosciences), engineering (biomedical, mechanical, petroleum, aerospace), and business (economic modeling). Researchers and scientists plug into TACC’s massive computing power to test their theories of how the world works and to visualize results. Members of TACC’s research team improve the way supercomputers work through hardware and software research. The center is involved in several initiatives that will expand the availability of high-performance computing resources to those at the university, in Texas and around the country. As TACC expands networking resources, it also will expand its physical resources with a new building. Construction has begun on a 94,000-square-foot building TACC will share with the university’s Institute for Geophysics. TeraGridLast summer, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $10 million to TACC over the next five years as part of an effort to expand the TeraGrid. TACC is one of eight supercomputing centers across the nation that provide the TeraGrid’s computational, storage, software and instrument and visualization resources, along with user support and related services. TeraGrid—built over the past four years—is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. The TeraGrid team expects this comprehensive cyberinfrastructure to affect virtually every scientific discipline that requires intensive computing capabilities, from disease diagnosis and weather forecasting to the study of drug interactions with cancer cells and aircraft design simulation. UT GridNow in its second year, the UT Grid project will integrate the university’s computer resources—from desktop computers to supercomputers—into a campus wide cyber infrastructure available to the entire university community. The UT Grid team is developing services with interfaces to support a single integrated environment focusing on requirements from research and education. The team has deployed technologies to create and enable massive production computing using the desktops and workstations across campus, and will greatly expand this service in the year ahead. The team is developing software to integrate parallel computing systems, enable remote visualization, and manage files and data between users’ local systems and TACC’s central systems. The integration of these vast resources - from 'personal scale' to terascale–into UT Grid enable resource access and sharing on an unprecedented scale and facilitate new models for use and coordination. UT Grid will enable higher performance and advanced capabilities in computational research, new paradigms for educational applications, and innovation in grid computing itself. Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE)TIGRE is a joint project of Rice University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, the University of Houston and The University of Texas at Austin to construct a Texas-wide grid. The State of Texas funded TIGRE this year with the purpose of enhancing research and education, fostering academic-government-private research partnerships and transferring technologies to Texas companies. The approach taken by TIGRE is to identify and support application domains that are of importance to Texas such as computational geophysics, air quality modeling and computational biology, deploy a grid across the five initial TIGRE members for use by these application domains, and to expand TIGRE to many other institutions in Texas. |
