Professor Robert Briber (Materials Science and Engineering [MSE]) has received a $15 million award over five years from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for “Spectroscopy and Scattering using Cold Neutrons for Applications in Materials Science and Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics and Chemistry.” The award supports work with the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) on using neutron scattering to characterize advanced materials and provide instrument support for a broad range of neutron scattering and spectroscopy instruments in the NCNR national user facility.

Under contract to Wyle Laboratories, the Center for Reliability Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) will run the Department of Defense Reliability Information Analysis Center (RIAC). The contract is valued at approximately $5 million. RIAC will be a center of excellence for all aspects of reliability and quality engineering, and serve not only the defense department but other government organizations and corporations.

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Christopher Davis (left photo) and his research team, the Maryland Optics Group, together with co-principal investigator Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Professor Stuart Milner (right photo), have been awarded a new research contract by the Office of Naval Research for their work titled “High Altitude Relay Router Package: Optical/RF Data Links.” This three-year, $2.7 million contract is shared with a sub-contractor, Techno-Sciences, Inc. of Lanham, Md.

Working with collaborators at Yale, Rochester, NIST and Cabot, Professor Michael Zachariah (ME and the Maryland Center for Integrated Nano Science and Engineering [M-CINSE]) will pursue the manufacture of safe, carbon-based nanoparticles (to which human beings are most frequently exposed). This National Science Foundation Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NSF-NIRT) program comprises a three-year, $1.4 million effort.

Associate Professor Don DeVoe (ME), Associate Professor Cheng Lee (Chemistry), and Assistant Professor Doug English (Chemistry) were awarded a $1.2 million grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute for General Medical Science. The award, titled "Ultrasensitive Proteomics via 2-D Microfluidic Profiling," involves the development of new micro and nanofluidic technology for analyzing proteins in limited biological samples such as human tissue biopsies.

MSE Professors Gottlieb Oehrlein (left photo) and Ray Phaneuf (right photo) were awarded a NSF-NIRT grant ($1.2 million) for a proposal to investigate "Nanotechnological Manufacturing: Nanostructured Polymers Designed for Plasma/Energetic Beam Templating of Materials.”

Associate Professor Hamid Ghandehari (Bioengineering and the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy) was recently awarded a $1.1 million four-year grant by the National Cancer Institute for a project entitled “Engineering Polymers for Gene Therapy of Head and Neck Cancer.” Ghandehari held the Third Annual Symposium on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore in September.