Discovery Park

Researchers at Discovery Park are joining colleagues from Indian and other U.S. institutions for a three-day conference this week at Purdue University on nanotechnology's growing role in creating future electronics.

Frontiers in Scalable Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces is scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday (March 10-12) at the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121.

Leading the conference are researchers from Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center and the International Centre for Materials Science at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India.

The three-day event will feature lectures, presentations and panel discussions on the scalable use of nanomaterials, the physics of nanoelectronics, integrating nanomaterials for energy and biological applications, and nanomaterials and devices for clean energy and energy conservation.

A.K. Sood, professor and head of physics department at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, will deliver the keynote lecture 9 a.m. Tuesday (March 10). Sood, who has published 230 research papers and holds two patents in the United States and four in India, will talk about his research in  replacing silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes.

Sponsors for the event are the U.S. National Science Foundation, Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, Birck Nanotechnology Center and Discovery Park. For a complete schedule, go to http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/
nanotechnology/nanointerfaces/. Event organizers are:

* Timothy Fisher, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue who leads the thermalHUB project in Discovery Park.

* Giridhar Kulkarni, professor and chairman of the Chemistry and Physics of Materials Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore.

* Timothy Sands, Purdue's Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering and director of the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Discovery Park.

* Umesh Waghmare, associate professor of the Theoretical Sciences Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.

Nanomaterials, defined as synthetic particles or fibers less than 100 nanometers in diameter, have applications in a wide range of everyday objects. Carbon nanotubes, for example, are used as conductive wires, and polymer-based nanocomposites and nanostructured ceramics have fire resistant, conductivity and stiffness properties.