NEWS | OCTOBER 6, 2005

Science
NanoFab funding may jump
A bill in Congress would send $25 million to two projects that include UTA.

By C J Patton
The Shorthorn staff

The university could see a significant increase in funding for its nanotechnology and bioengineering research areas if a proposed funding bill passes through Congress.

On Sept. 28, the Senate Appropriations Committee, at the urging of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, approved an appropriations bill to the Department of Defense that would allocate $25 million to two collaborative efforts in which UTA is a participant.

Anthony DeBruyn, UT System assistant director for public relations, said the committee’s approval is just the first step in the process, and the funding won’t become finalized until all of Congress has a chance to approve it.

“It looks like it’s going to go to the Senate for the full vote either later this week or next week,” he said. “Then it will go to the House for reconciling and then on to the president for signing.”

If passed into law, the bill would sanction $15 million to the Strategic Partnership for Research in Nanotechnology, a consortium of UTA, other UT System schools and Rice University.

“We’re excited that [the partnership] is getting this additional funding, and we’re grateful to Senator Hutchinson for her efforts,” DeBruyn said.

He said the total would likely be split equally among the six participants, with UTA receiving $2.5 million.

Zeynep Çelik-Butler, NanoFab Research and Teaching Facility director, said that if the bill passes, the university’s funds would be distributed equally to the nanotechnology research centers run by the Science and Engineering colleges.

Dr. Çelik-Butler said she plans to use her facility’s $1.25 million cut to purchase equipment for the lab, which will help fine-tune the nanomanufacturing process, the creation of devices at an atomic scale.

“We’re looking into two large pieces of equipment,” she said. “It’s going to be basically to increase our fabrication and characterization capabilities.”

Çelik-Butler said the addition of a sputtering system and an electron beam evaporation system will significantly improve the ability to create thin-layer deposits on nanoscale devices. She said the thinner the lab researchers can make the material layers, the more complex they can make the devices without sacrificing size.

“We can make them now, but we’re going to increase our capabilities to control these layers at a smaller scale,” she said. “That will enable us to make better nanoscale electronic devices, better optoelectronics and better sensors.”

Included in the bill is an additional $10 million which will be sent to the Metroplex Comprehensive Medical Imaging Center, a collaboration between UTA, UT-Southwestern Medical Center and UT-Dallas. DeBruyn said this money will not be split among the universities but will go to UT-Southwestern, where the center is based.

UTA Bioengineering Chair Khosrow Behbehani said UT-Southwestern is in the process of building a facility for the center, which is expected to open either later this year or early 2006. He said the funding would help in purchasing equipment for the facility’s labs.

Dr. Behbehani said he’s looking into several pieces of optical imaging equipment for the center designed to diagnose medical conditions without invasive examinations or harmful X-rays.

“For instance, we can use infrared light to measure blood circulation in the body,” he said. “You can basically take an image with a camera sensitive to the heat and see if there is a blockage in the blood stream.”

CORRECTIONS

In this story, the “By the Millions” information box should have stated that the congressional funds listed were applied to the Strategic Partnership for Research in Nanotechnology (SPRING).

In this story, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s name was misspelled.

The University of Texas at Arlington | Department of Student Publications
© Copyright 2001. All Rights Reserved. Corrections | Webmaster