Greetings everyone.
My name is Steven Boggs and I'm
the Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences.
Joining me is Dean Al Pisano
from the Jacobs School of Engineering.
We are thrilled to have this opportunity to introduce
UC San Diego's new
Institute for Materials Discovery and Design
to the Foundation Board.
Material science is an incredibly broad field
covering everything that makes up the world around
us and materials drive
technology in ways that we don't always appreciate.
Innovations in materials enable us to
create smaller and more powerful computers,
make batteries more efficient,
solar cells more prolific,
create synthetic tissues for
medical applications and much more.
Modern technology is largely
a reflection of modern materials.
UC San Diego has from
its founding than a leader in the study of materials,
several of our departments are largely focused
on materials research, including physics,
chemistry and biochemistry, nanoengineering,
bio engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering.
Our research efforts have been interdisciplinary from
the start but as the university continues to grow,
we want to keep this work collaborative.
On September 29th of this year,
Dean Pisano and I were thrilled to officially kick off
the new UC-San Diego
Institute for Materials Discovery and Design,
a joint initiative of
the Jacobs School of Engineering
and division of physical sciences.
We are grateful to Chancellor Khosla and Executive Vice
Chancellor Simmons for
their strong support of this initiative.
The Institute endeavors to create a unique,
world-class facility that will enable and
attract unprecedented levels of support for innovative,
interdisciplinary, inclusive research and
training in the science and engineering of materials.
The purpose of the IMDD is to
enable accelerated discovery and
designing materials with improved properties
for application in energy systems,
electronics, information technology, telecommunications,
space systems and medicine.
The mission of the IMDD is to transform research,
education and training in
material science and engineering across the campus.
We are thrilled to have with us today Dr.
Shirley Meng Zable Professor of Nanoengineering,
who serves as founding director of
the institute and Dr. Michael Sailor,
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry,
who serves as founding co-director.
They will give you much more insight into
the institute in a few moments.
The IMDD includes several important initiatives.
First, the institute will build
on UC San Diego's resources,
such as the Nano 3 facility
and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
IMDD is establishing
a world-class nanoanalytical instrumentation facility
within the Nano 3 facilities in Atkinson Hall.
The state of the art
Thermo Fisher Scientific
transmission electron microscope,
or TEM, is dedicated to materials characterization.
Second, at the campus wide materials science in
engineering graduate program is
a critical component of the institute.
IMDD develops new training
and curriculum in data analytics
and machine learning for
application to material science and engineering,
as well as nanoanalytical data fabrication training
associated with the Nano 3 facility.
The institute is working towards
establishing new graduate fellowships
in material science through collaboration with industry,
foundation and community partners.
Next, as the institute builds up
the campus research instrumentation capability,
UC San Diego will be better positioned to compete for
large multi investigator
Materials Research Center Awards.
We have already seen our first success
with the award this past summer of
a highly coveted National
Science Foundation Materials Research,
Science and Engineering Center
award led by Professor Sailor.
Finally, the institute hosts
a distinguished seminar series intended to catalyze
new collaborations while raising
UC San Diego's national profile
and international stature.
Physical sciences plays a unique role in
materials research and one that
strongly complements the role of engineering.
Materials research in physics and
chemistry and biochemistry is largely
focused on understanding the basic properties
of matter by detailed understanding of
the underlying physics that governs how atoms and
molecules come together and
interact to create completely new systems.
Our scientists are less focused on
the application of the materials
and more focused on understanding and
creating whole new classes of material.
Two areas of modern research are particularly
right for transformative materials discoveries.
First, detailed understanding of quantum physics,
coupled with the unprecedented power of supercomputers,
is enabling us to design materials with
novel properties from
the atomic and molecular scales upwards.
Key to understanding this is emergent phenomena.
How quantum interactions between atoms and molecules can
produce completely new properties like superconductivity,
that the individual atoms and molecules do not exhibit.
Breakthroughs in this area
allow materials researchers to create
whole new classes of materials
from the atomic level upwards.
In the process, these new quantum materials allow us to
refine and improve our understanding of quantum physics.
Second, modern biophysics and
biochemistry have revolutionized our view of
living systems and enabling us to understand how
living cells function from the molecular level upwards.
This molecular understanding of
the processes of life enable whole new fields
of research incorporating
these molecular tools into synthetic matter.
Synthetic biology creates materials with
properties only seen in living organisms.
By studying these synthetic materials,
researchers are getting a better understanding
of the processes of life itself.
Let me hand this over to my partner in this endeavor,
Dean Al Pisano, who can better
elaborate on the role of engineering in this effort.
Good morning everybody.
My name is Al Pisano,
I'm the Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering.
I'm here to help celebrate the launch of the IMDD.
I want to thank Steven Boggs for
that wonderful introduction and I want to point out
my hopes not only for the great success of
the IMDD but for
its role in creating a new kind of student,
a student that I like to
call someone of the innovation workforce.
Now, I appreciate Steve's sentiments and indeed,
Steven Boggs and I are
very strong partners in
reconnecting engineering and the basic sciences.
We're doing this because this is
core to who we are as a university.
My hope is that
the IMDD becomes the first of many things that we build
together that can capture more of
the wonderful research value
that we are actually creating.
I have a concrete proposal on how we might do
this and I call this the
innovation centers for platform technologies.
Indeed, I see the IMDD as the first of these.
What is the potential future of the IMDD?
We'll hear from the faculty how it got started,
where they are now and where they're going.
Let me paint a picture of where they might arrive.
I believe the IMDD can evolve
into a wonderful innovation center
for platform technologies.
These are public private partnerships that tie
together engineering and basic science in
pre-collaborative collaboration.
They attract federal funding to protect
the US research enterprise,
they accelerate the creation of
a new student who I like to call
the innovation workforce and they
drive hardware virtualization to
drive more value from innovation.
That means we create models
of reality that we can manipulate faster
than we can manipulate reality so that we know
where we want our physical materials to go.
Then finally, because we have these virtualized models,
we can provide nationwide virtual access
for a large group of outsiders to
benefit from all the work that
we've done and thereby capture
the value of the research we've
created and spread it throughout the United States.
As I said before,
IMDD represents a huge opportunity to do this.
It's evolved into becoming
the first innovation center for
platform technologies and better,
I looked to the IMDD for that next generation
of San Diego companies
that have been creating and capturing value.
Now, we all know many of
the older companies link a bit Qualcomm, Viasat, Cymer,
Genomatica but those of you who have been looking in
the newspaper recently may have noticed Lucira Health,
first company to provide an at-home COVID 19 test kit.
That is a San Diego company.
I look to San Diego for
creating even more companies like this and so
the great opportunity that IMDD
represents and that's a partnership between
engineering and physical sciences
represents is that we are going to build
the ecosystem that empowers
the material science students to become
tomorrow's innovation workforce in
a very wide range of industries.
I want to thank everyone for your attention,
I hope that you like and share
this vision that I have and please be
assured that Steven Boggs and I are
strong partners along with our faculty,
trying to make this grand vision become real.
Thank you.
[MUSIC]