Hi, everybody. My name is Mike Sailor.
I'm a professor of chemistry and
biochemistry at UC San Diego.
I'm here to tell you
a little bit about what we're doing at
the Institute for Materials Discovery and Design.
I'm the co-director, the director is Shirley Meng.
I'm going to start out just giving
some visions of what we
think the Materials Institute is really all about.
Comments that I've heard from Shirley,
what are the things that you would like to
have a material do?
One is an electric car with a 500-mile range.
Second, a cell phone that you could
charge just once a month, just plug it in.
We've heard from people
that they'd like to have a cell phone
that charges off of their body heat
so they never have to plug it in.
A 100 percent energy from sun and wind,
what do we mean by that?
If we have renewable energy,
we have to be able to store it somehow.
That's all enabled by materials.
One of the areas that I work on more
specifically is in using materials to
augment or improve
medical devices and medical interventions.
Several dreams we have are: trying to develop
new cures for Alzheimer's disease.
Treatments that could prevent blindness in
the 11 million patients out
there today who have macular degeneration,
which is a disease of the eye,
typically afflicting older people.
We're all talking now and focus so
much on the current coronavirus,
but another coronavirus is going to
come along or some other disease like that at some point.
What we learned with
our previous experiences about coronavirus is,
that we could apply it to these new ones,
one of the key lessons is we really want to
be able to get vaccines up and running very quickly.
Can we just be enabled by materials?
In fact, the answer is they can.
This is Tod Pascal,
who is another member of our Institute.
He is a computational scientist and one of
his visions is to develop
quantum devices for more secure banking.
This requires materials actually.
Not clear to most people that it does,
but it's really important element of
making banking systems more secure in the future.
Having a rapid home diagnostic test for cancer
and a sensor that can detect
toxins in our drinking water.
What are the goals for IMDD?
First, just to give you a sense
of where we're going with this institute,
we really want to enable innovation for all of
the folks here at UC San Diego who are
focused on materials research.
We believe that we should be able
to stand up a center that
really encompasses all the effort
that's going on in materials.
Materials is an unusual field because it's
really a very broad, very interdisciplinary field.
You can be a chemist working in materials
and you obviously bring your perspective
as a chemist in thinking about how to put molecules
together and taking those molecules
and making a material.
You can be an engineer in thinking about
the final properties of something that
you're trying to make and how do you engineer in
that material property that
it will actually perform in a way you want it to.
There's a really strong complementarity
between all of the disciplines: physics, chemistry,
mathematics, engineering,
biological sciences focusing on materials.
The real purpose of
our center is to try to
enable all these scientists here at
campus who are working on materials
to try to enable their research,
improve their ability to get their job done.
There are a number of areas we focus on: energy systems,
electronic devices,
lots of emphasis on information technologies,
and computational technologies, and medicine also,
of course, a really very important
element where materials can have a huge impact.
Our mission is really just to try
to transform that research,
education, and training in
materials science and engineering.
Get this in the term of what
Shirley Meng likes to say is the three Fs,
which is faculty, facilities, and fellowships.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
I want to back up a little bit and talk a bit about
how materials science and
materials engineering at UCSD
really has impacted already
the commercial world and the world that we live in today.
What you're looking at here is a picture of David Walt,
who is a professor from
Harvard University who founded a company called Illumina,
which I'm sure you're probably all familiar with.
It's a very large company,
multi-billion dollar company, founded in San Diego.
You can see the quote he gave here on that.
One of the reasons he decided to cite Illumina in
the San Diego area was because UC San Diego was here.
Even back all the way in the early 90s,
the materials science programs and
materials scientist at UC San Diego
were making an impact.
Drilling down from there, I'll give you one
more personal experience with Illumina,
that when they first got started,
they called me and said, "Hey,
do you have any good students that you could send to us?
We were looking to hire
some technical staff members to get
our technology off the ground."
Christie Canaria, who was
a high school student here in San Diego,
was already working in my laboratory a few years earlier.
She transitioned to her BS degree
and got her bachelor's degree here at UC San Diego.
Throughout that whole period, she actually worked in
my laboratory and did research.
When they called me and said, "Hey, we need some good,
technically competent materials related scientist to
help us get our technology off the
ground," she was a natural,
I recommended her, they hired her.
The picture that you're seeing there
labeled Illumina-2000,
actually that's from their promotional brochure
back in the early 2000s.
That's a picture of her holding one
of the first devices that Illumina
developed for doing their high-throughput
DNA diagnostic screening technologies.
After that, she moved more into policy and
became a fellow for
the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
and then moved into NIH.
One of the things she told me just recently was,
''It's interesting I've come full circle.
When I started at Illumina,
they were funded by the SBIR Program.''
That's a Small Business Innovative
Research Program that was
a big government program to help
small companies get off the ground.
Now she actually runs that SBIR Program at NIH.
It's interesting. What last elements?
As the Materials Center
and as this Institute was getting started,
and we've really just been going for about a year now,
one of the first things it did, as I had mentioned,
was to try to initiate and elaborate on
the existing efforts that
we have at UCSD focusing on materials.
There was an opportunity that came along from
the National Science Foundation called a MRSEC.
That M-R-S-E-C stands for
Materials Research Science and Engineering Center,
a major funding initiative
by the National Science Foundation to
try to improve our material science programs
across the country.
They put out a call, we pitched for it.
This is my team,
and you see Shirley Meng's here as well as myself,
we're part of the facilities and
the leadership staff of the MRSEC.
It actually got funded, we landed
an $18 million grant just earlier this year.
That is going to then focus on,
for the next six years,
two really big themes.
One that harnesses our computational expertise here at
UC San Diego using
computers to try to design new materials.
People have been using computer to
design new materials for a long time.
Probably the biggest impact that
you've seen in it is a lot of
the medicines we use today
were designed originally on a computer.
They figured out how that molecule bound to
the receptor and then designed
the best molecules that might be able to do that to go
after a specific targeted disease.
But we really haven't applied
those very high technology, high fidelity,
tools to designing materials of other types,
and that's really one of the focuses of that.
The second focus of our center
is using synthetic biology to create materials,
using the tools of biology to create new materials.
Again, in the medical field,
that's really common to use
biology to create new materials.
They use Liant giant reactors to make a lot of
the biologic drugs that are used today.
An example is Avastin,
an antibody-based drug that's
used to treat macular degeneration,
a disease of the eye.
Doctors inject it into patients daily.
Those drugs were synthesized
in basically giant vat reactors
like the ones that used to make beer.
Can we use those same biotechnology tools that can make
these exquisitely accurately and potent drugs to make
some very exquisite and potent
new materials that could do
things other than just act as medicines?
That's really what that's focusing on.
Lastly, just going to cover what we've been doing at
the center really to focus on education.
We have a strong program for engaging students,
people like Christie Canaria,
the next generation of students who are going to be
our knowledge workers and
our technology workers in the materials community.
We run these summer schools as part of
our MRSEC for six weeks every summer.
We bring these people in,
these can be high-school students like Christie was,
they could be undergraduate
students, even graduate students,
or even senior professors
who want to come visit our labs.
We train them for six weeks on our techniques,
and then they're ready and polished to go
into the field of materials.
That's just one little snippet
of what we're doing with our MRSEC.