September 30, 2005

Purdue's Birck nanotech center to be dedicated Oct. 8

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center, considered among the best university facilities of its kind in the nation, will be dedicated during an Oct. 8 ceremony.

The event will take place at 10 a.m. in a tent in front of the new 187,000-square-foot facility at 1205 W. State St. in Purdue's Discovery Park. A free continental breakfast will be served at the program. Anyone wanting to attend the breakfast should call (765) 494-0900 or e-mail event@purdue.edu for reservations. At 9:30 a.m. there will be public tours of the facility.

The Birck center has been operating since Discovery Park was formed in 2001, but researchers associated with the center have been using existing laboratories and equipment in campus facilities.

The building was completed in September after construction began in 2003. The $58.3 million center involves about 260 faculty and staff members and graduate students from 25 schools and departments across the university.

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.

Research is generally regarded as "nano-scale" if it concerns objects that have dimensions of 100 nanometers or smaller. To put that scale of measurement into perspective, a human red blood cell is about 7,500 nanometers across, and one nanometer is roughly 10 atoms wide. The letter "I" printed here is about one million nanometers wide.

A sophisticated feature of the building is its large suite of "clean rooms," 25,000 square feet of space containing a series of labs, said George Adams, the center's research development manager and an adjunct associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

"We call them the high-accuracy rooms," Adams said. "In these labs we will use scanning probe microscopy and other techniques to examine the structure of materials nearly on an atom-by-atom basis."

The center is named for Michael and Katherine (Kay) Birck, of Hinsdale, Ill. The Bircks contributed $30 million for the building. He is a Purdue alumnus, a member of the Purdue Board of Trustees and chairman of Tellabs Inc. Kay Birck, a Terre Haute, Ind. native, recently retired as head of nursing at Women's Healthcare of Hinsdale.

Purdue alumni Donald and Carol Scifres also donated $10 million to the center, and alumni William B. and Mary Jane Elmore provided $2 million toward the center's William and Mary Jane Elmore Advanced Wireless Concept Validation Laboratory.

Writers: Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, venere@purdue.edu

Cynthia Sequin, (765) 494-4192, csequin@purdue.edu

Source: George B. Adams, (765) 494-2698, gba@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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