2011 Annual Report - Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies - Los ...

From the Directors’ Office
We are pleased to share with you this 2011 edition of
the Annual Report from the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies
(CINT) and the growing excitement we feel
around cementing our brand as a leader in integration
nanoscience. This can be seen most readily in the momentum
we have achieved in our signature Integration
Focus Activities (IFAs). These efforts unite our scientists
across our four scientific Thrust areas with our users to
concentrate research on larger-scale nanoscience integration
challenges for specific classes of nanomaterials,
systems, and phenomena. All three of our current IFAs (p.
10) now have a full head of steam, and nearly 30% of our
current user projects map in some meaningful way to one
of these IFAs. As part of our redoubled effort to increase
our industrial user base, we are also looking to leverage
these IFAs to build a stronger link to and spur recruitment
within our industrial user community. We believe that the
IFAs are a natural community-building tool with an intrinsic
value proposition for industry; an R&D pipeline that can
lead to more mature, more commercially well-positioned
technologies. Finally, as nanoscience and nanotechnology
are maturing, we as a research community are beginning
to see our efforts extend in many exciting new directions.
Our focus on nanoscience integration positions us
very well to capitalize on new opportunities including the
emerging Mesoscale Initiative within the DOE Office of
Science. Many aspects of mesoscale science are embodied
in the integration of nanoscale building blocks.
We are equally proud of our continuing strong performance
in support of our user program. We have fully
transitioned to our new user proposal database providing
enhanced convenience and flexibility for proposal submission
and review. In our two regular proposal calls this year
we received a total of 225 proposals, an increase of 10%
over our 2010 performance. Our official count on number
of users for the period remains at ~ 350 and continues
to reflect full engagement of our scientific staff. We are
also seeing a steady increase in our industrial user base,
with the number of industrial proposals (including Rapid
Access proposals) doubling in 2011. We attribute this in
part of our outreach efforts including our focused industrial
session in each of our past two annual User Conferences
(p. 20)
As always, we welcome feedback and invite suggestions
from our users and all stakeholders on all aspects of our
user program and Center operations. We hope you find
this annual report informative and, more importantly, that it
will motivate you to continue your engagement with CINT
or to become a CINT user.
David Morris, Director Neal Shinn, Co-Director S. Tom Picraux, Chief Scientist
Heather Brown,
User Program Coordinator
Antonya Sanders,
Communications Coordinator
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4The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies | 2011 Annual Report