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NEWS
| OCTOBER 27, 2005
Science and Engineering
Colleges share research findings
Researchers say they want to work
together across disciplinary lines.
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| The Shorthorn: Drew Campbell |
| Arthur Ellis, chemistry division
director of the National Science Foundation, speaks
about cyber-enabled science and engineering Wednesday
in Nedderman Hall. The speech was part of UTA’s
Research Day 2005, which is a collaboration between engineering
and science. |
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By C
J Patton
The Shorthorn staff
Posters filled Nedderman Hall on Wednesday as students and faculty
lined up to present their latest findings for Research Day 2005.
The event, designed to display the university’s departments’
latest research breakthroughs, was the largest collaboration between
the colleges of Science and Engineering, Science Dean Paul Paulus
said.
“I think it’s the first time we’ve gotten these
groups together to realize that they ought to come together more
often,” he said. “It’s very important for these
people to talk across disciplines.”
Dr. Paulus said presenting ideas from the various fields is essential
for both colleges to grow, due to the increasingly far-reaching
nature of modern research.
“We still have the old model of everyone’s in a department
— everyone has a home, but, intellectually, we’re no
longer stuck in a department,” he said. “More and more
of the big issues cross disciplinary lines.”
Arthur Ellis, National Science Foundation’s chemistry division
director, said the interdisciplinary collaboration reaches the national
level. He said cooperation among departments that were previously
isolated is becoming more common and that the foundation has developed
a revolutionary way of following it.
“Increasingly, we are able to use what are called cyber tools
to map science,” he said. “You can take an agency and
see where its interests lie on the map.”
Ellis said the map, which plots every area of focus from biotechnology
to computer modeling, shows a large trend in nanotechnology. He
said that reaching across several disciplines — material science,
engineering, physics — is what makes nanotechnology a promising
field for future research and that the emerging breakthroughs are
also promising.
“Increasingly, we’re at a stage where we can say, ‘If
I want a material with a certain set of properties, how do I go
about designing it?’ ” he said. “You can start
from scratch, and say, ‘Here’s what I want. What do
I do to get there?’ ”
Ellis said the advances in nanotechnology have spawned several interesting
research areas in their own right. For instance, he said the study
of nanoparticles has led to discovering that gold becomes a red
material that has potential as an oxygen catalyst at the nanoscale.
“One of the reasons you can appreciate that scientists are
interested in nanoparticles is that these really are new forms of
matter,” he said.
Michael Jin, material science and engineering assistant professor,
presented his research in solar cells at the event, describing his
discoveries while searching for renewable energy.
Dr. Jin said the ability to deposit solar-energy-gathering materials
on a thin film of polymer could impact society in the future.
“Eventually, we’ll get flexible solar cells that you
can use for a lot of things — you can roll them up and carry
them,” he said. “You carry your backpack around, and
you can put a polymer solar cell on there, and you can charge your
iPod while you walk.”
Jin predicts a variety of energy sources will be used in tandem
as society relies less on fossil fuels; however only solar energy
has the production capability to replace fossil fuels on its own,
without the complications of the other sources, such as nuclear
power, he said.
“If you have a real environmental crisis — that we have
to stop using oil right now — the only technology you can
actually use to meet those needs is solar energy,” he said.
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