Purdue News
Purdue News
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September 7, 2001 Purdue unveils Discovery Park – center of synergy, innovationWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University today (Friday, 9/7) rolled out plans for its new $100 million Discovery Park.
The park will bring together researchers from a wide range of specialties to foster a synergy of faculty, students, business and industry for the exploration of new ideas, technologies and products. Four major centers are planned for the park so far: The Birck Nanotechnology Center, a bioscience/engineering center, an e-enterprises center, and a center for entrepreneurship. "The world is changing," said Purdue University President Martin C. Jischke. "Science, technology and engineering – Purdue's core strengths – are revolutionizing our lives and driving the development of new products, services, knowledge and needs. "It is time for a great research institution like Purdue to take the lead in readying students, the state of Indiana and society at large for this new world. Because discovery doesn't happen in a vacuum, Discovery Park will bring together people from a diverse range of specialties to collaborate on projects." Today's announcement launched Discover Purdue Week, which concludes with the Purdue-Notre Dame football game, Sept. 15. Discover Purdue Week, in turn, kicks off of a yearlong campaign to help Hoosiers "Discover Purdue." The park will be developed on about 40 acres bounded by State Street on the north, Nimitz Drive on the south, Airport Road on the west and South Intramural Drive on the east. Facilities in the park will attract researchers and students from fields including electrical engineering, computer science, biology, economics, management and the liberal arts. "These centers have enormous scientific and economic potential," Jischke said. "They offer Purdue the chance to increase research grants and contracts, retain our most talented faculty and turn research findings into new processes and products that help to advance the economy." Ground was broken today (Friday, 9/7) on the first of those buildings, the $51 million nanotechnology center. The new center, scheduled to open in the fall of 2004, will be among the best university facilities in the nation dedicated to nanotechnology research, Jischke said. It will be funded with a combination of private and public money. HDR Inc., a worldwide architectural-engineering firm headquartered in Omaha, Neb., is designing the center. HDR recently designed the Advanced Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md. The $235 million NIST lab, which is currently under construction, will be among the most advanced measurement facilities in the world. Funds are being raised for the other centers that will make up Discovery Park. Birck Nanotechnology Center Nanotechnology is an emerging science in which new materials and tiny structures are built atom-by-atom, or molecule-by-molecule, instead of the more conventional approach of sculpting parts from pre-existing materials. Nano is a prefix meaning one-billionth, so a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Just as antibiotics, the silicon transistor and plastics affected nearly every aspect of society in the 20th century, nanotechnology is expected to have profound influences in the 21st century. The possibilities include: • The creation of entirely new materials with superior strength, electrical conductivity, resistance to heat and other properties. • Microscopic machines for a variety of uses, including probes that could be injected into the body for medical diagnostics and repair. • A new class of ultra-small, super-powerful computers and other electronic devices, including spacecraft. • A technology in which biology and electronics are merged, creating "gene chips" that instantly detect food-borne contamination, dangerous substances in the blood or chemical warfare agents in the air. • Artificial organs. • The development of "molecular electronics" and devices that "self assemble," similar to the growth of complex organic structures in living organisms. Theoretically, once set in motion, such self-assembling devices would build themselves, making electronics processing far less expensive than conventional semiconductor processing. Bioscience/Engineering Center The bioscience/engineering center will support a variety of projects, some of which will explore genomics, which is the mapping of individual genes of living organisms and then figuring out how those thousands of genes function. This would show how cells are regulated and respond to chemicals, mutations, environmental stimuli, age, disease and pathogens. Genomics research offers promise in many areas, from improving the disease resistance of plants and animals, to saving endangered wildlife and increasing the production of certain crops that require fewer pesticides. "Many Purdue faculty are making advances based upon genomics," Jischke said. "Genomics is enabling the development of corn, soybeans and wheat that can withstand the stresses of severe weather. Genomics advancements allow faculty to understand pollination processes to produce better crops." The bioscience/engineering center also will connect researchers in the life sciences with engineers in the nanotechnology center. Researchers in medicinal chemistry, electrical engineering and other fields already are at work designing devices and electronic chips that will use DNA to quickly detect substances in the blood, air or in food. The center will focus initially on the interdisciplinary fields of biomedical engineering and proteomic analysis. One focus of biomedical engineering will be "tissue engineering," creating materials from animal tissue that can promote healing in people. These products now are being used to treat urinary incontinence in women, repair internal organs and damaged ligaments, and cure skin wounds and chronic sores. Two Indiana companies hold licenses from Purdue to develop the technology. Proteomics involves identifying and studying proteins formed in living systems when specific genes are activated. The main objective of this work will be to create a new generation of devices in the next decade that will allow the nearly instantaneous analysis of up to 500,000 components in living cells. The work has many potential applications. For example, these instruments might be used in a doctor's office to diagnose and treat patients, analyze food, take biological field samples and scan the air for contamination much faster and more efficiently than conventional instruments. Other research will focus on identifying genes and proteins that make insects resistant to pesticides, learning the gene sequences of insects important for agriculture and identifying critical proteins involved in aggressive stinging behavior in bees. New tools in genomics and proteomics will help Purdue researchers improve the quality and production of hardwood trees that are important for the furniture industry. "The outcomes of this research will be superior trees that grow faster, are resistant to naturally occurring diseases and outbreaks of insects, and trees that yield higher quality wood products," Jischke said. E-enterprises Center The e-enterprises center will pull together a myriad of related new-technology activities on the campus, with a special focus on three core areas where Purdue has, or can develop, national leadership: • Network security and reliability. • Management of distributed e-enterprises, including database systems. • Logistics and distribution of products and marketing of e-enterprises. Purdue's new e-enterprises center will bring together faculty and students with strengths in database systems design and integration engineering, software engineering, communication, management, operations systems, production systems, decision theory applications, system performance, risk evaluation, marketing, customer service and model simulation. "The word e-enterprise suggests new forms of commerce that could not have existed before recent advances in information technology," Jischke said. "But it should also reflect the transformation that more established industries are being forced to undertake in response to the same factors." Through this center, an entire business – commerce, supply chain, management, operations, product life-cycle control, customer service and data security – can be modeled, analyzed and made more efficient. Working with Purdue's industrial and government partners, the center will be an interactive test bed that will combine computer models with human behavior at various levels (from strategy formulation to operations management) in a real-world environment. A key component will be the design and development of computer security tools. "This center is only fitting for Purdue, which started the nation's first computer science program," Jischke said. "Purdue now produces more information technology grads – majors in computer sciences, computer engineering, computer technology, computer graphics technology and the management of information systems – than any university in the nation." Center for Entrepreneurship: The center for entrepreneurship will nurture the entrepreneurial spirit of Purdue faculty and students. It will be the home of: • The Technology Transfer Initiative, which will research issues industry encounters when trying to license and market new technologies and products. It also will help faculty design courses to teach entrepreneurship. • The Purdue Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program, in which undergraduates work with community service agencies to find ways to use technology to solve problems and improve services. • The Burton D. Morgan Entrepreneurial Competition, in which engineering and management students work together to demonstrate their ideas for new products or services and show how they could be developed into profitable businesses. • The Innovation Realization Lab, which pairs engineering and management graduate students on projects to help them understand the way research fits in with social and commercial needs. • Forums where graduating students can present business plans to business and community leaders. Writer: Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, venere@purdue.edu Source: Martin C. Jischke, (765) 494-9708 Related Web sites: PHOTO CAPTION: Purdue University today (Friday, 9/7) rolled out plans for its new $100 million Discovery Park. The park will bring together researchers from a wide range of specialties for the exploration of new ideas, technologies and products. Four major centers are planned for the park so far: The Birck Nanotechnology Center (NEC), a bioscience/engineering center (BEC), an e-enterprises center (EEC), and a center for entrepreneurship (CE). A publication-quality photograph is available at the News Service ftp site. Photo ID: nano.map.jpeg NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: Publication-quality photographs of Martin C. Jischke, a schematic of Discovery Park and a Discover Purdue logo are available at https://news.uns.purdue.edu or at ftp://ftp.purdue.edu/pub/uns/. They are called: Jischke.M.jpeg and Disc.Purdue.jpeg.
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