research in nanotechnology
The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative has awarded David LaVan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Yale, and Andrew Ellington of the University of Texas at Austin a grant in the amount of $75,000 to support their interdisciplinary research on nanoscience and nanotechnology.
LaVan and Ellington's project "Nano-Biocomposites for Conversion of Sunlight to Electricity" addresses the need for generating power economically. They have proposed a novel paradigm in which photons are transformed into high-energy electrons. Their work aims to meld bio- and nanotechnologies to create a system for solar energy capture that can be efficiently mass-produced and scaled to a variety of energy needs.
"The grant arose out of the revolutionary National Academies/Keck Foundation Futures meeting, the second of which was held this past fall. I helped to organize one, called 'Designing Nanostructures at the Interface between Biomedical and Physical Systems,'" says LaVan. "The goal of the meeting was to bring very divergent groups together -- such as doctors, biochemists and engineers -- lock them away for a weekend to see what would happen, and then to kick-start risky new ideas with a small number of seed grants to participants."
The 15-year National Academies Keck Futures Initiative was launched in 2003 to stimulate new modes of scientific inquiry and break down the conceptual and institutional barriers to interdisciplinary research. Funded by a $40 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, the initiative seeks to catalyze interdisciplinary inquiry and to enhance communication among researchers, funding agencies, universities and the general public -- with the goal of stimulating interdisciplinary research at the most exciting frontiers. The meetings are held on a different topic every two years and are limited to 100 selected participants.
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