NASCENT co-directors chemical engineering professor Roger Bonnecaze and mechanical engineering professor S.V. Sreenivasan at the NASCENT center.
Last September, the National Science Foundation selected The University of Texas at Austin to establish and lead — with the University of New Mexico and the University of California, Berkeley, as partners — an $18.5 million center called the Nanomanufacturing Systems for Mobile Computing and Mobile Energy Technologies (NASCENT). Led by Cockrell School of Engineering professors Roger Bonnecaze and S.V. Sreenivasan, the center will eventually spin out materials, models, machines and devices that could one day result in faster, energy-efficient and more flexible mobile phones, computers and yet-to-be-invented technologies.
Under the center’s collaborative model, NASCENT’s other goals are to educate students through NSF programs for high school students, K-12 teachers and undergraduates, and to work closely with industry to facilitate the commercialization of promising technologies that will make society better.
Here’s a snapshot of NASCENT’s first year at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin:
- 24 projects
- 24 faculty members
- 43 graduate students
- 5 post-doctoral researchers
- 9 corporate partners
- 4 high school students who performed research as NASCENT Fellows
- 4 Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students
- 2 K-12 educators who participated in the Research Experience for Teachers program (RET)
- 4 transformational nanomanufacturing processes: wafer-scale nanosculpting, roll-to-roll nanosculpting and nanomaterials, nanostructured thin silicon, and in-line optical nanometrology
