Message from the Directors

Message from the Directors

Over the last two decades, nanoscience research has demonstrated the potential to greatly improve functionality in areas such as electronics, healthcare and energy. It is fair to say, however, that few of these discoveries have found their way into the market place. Deployment of these advances at societal-impact scales will require revolutionary advances in high volume nanomanufacturing while simultaneously addressing scalability, reliability, sustainability and cost constraints. Furthermore, business innovation and the development of a high-tech workforce are critical to success.

This NSF Nanosystems ERC entitled Nanomanufacturing Systems for mobile Computing and Energy Technologies (NASCENT) is a partnership between The University of Texas at Austin, The University of New Mexico, The University of California at Berkeley, Indian Institute of Science, and Seoul National University. NASCENT will focus on creating high throughput, reliable and versatile nanomanufacturing systems through transformative research, education, and industrial partnerships. It will emphasize applications in the rapidly emerging area of mobile computing technologies which we believe will have a global impact on all aspects of healthcare, education, commerce, communications, computing and lifestyle in the coming decades. While mobile devices will be used to set the goals and priorities of Center manufacturing systems, the resulting knowledge will have much broader impact in computing, electronics, energy, healthcare, and sensing.