[BNC-all] Happy Thanksgiving, Announcement

[Shakouri, Ali]

Dear All,

I wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving. We had our first in-person Birck staff event after COVID with the Thanksgiving lunch last week. I was delighted to thank our outstanding staff who work behind the scenes for the smooth operation of the center. Covid and major changes in society in the last two years make us think about many of our assumptions. However, one thing is certain. The value of the organization is in people and how a shared vision and a common goal of research excellence and societal impact can make a whole which is much larger than individual parts.

I will be transitioning out of Birck leadership after ten years at the end of December. It has been a real privilege and honor to work with our outstanding students, staff and faculty. The vision and hard work of Jim Cooper, Dick Schwartz, Tim Sands, the founding faculty and dedicated staff have created a really unique interdisciplinary shared research environment that is rare in universities.

Birck faculty have been able to increase the research funds from $15-20M/year a decade ago to more than $30M/year while we reduced our research overhead (subsidy) to operate the recharge centers from 45-50% (which was in par with top nano centers in US) to ~35% just before COVID. Last year has been difficult financially, but our faculty have brought record grants and the operation is ramping up steadily.

Beyond supporting existing faculty, my major focus through cluster hires, preeminent teams and regular meetings with academic units has been the broadening of the Birck mission beyond nanoelectronics and quantum to ag, manufacturing, computer science/AI, biomedical/ vet med, pharmacy, physics, chemistry, and polytechnic. The SMART /WHIN projects have helped to align Birck’s mission to the mission of the original land-grant university by working closely with the community and elected officials in the ten surrounding counties. Purdue 2050, Conference of the Future, which was part of Purdue’s 150th anniversary events, helped us to connect to College of Liberal Arts, Honors College and Krannert. Some of this engagement is continuing through Neil Dilley’s great efforts in storytelling competition and new posters throughout the center. Birck strategic leadership team which included our managers (Zhihong Chen, Ron Reger, Mark Voorhis, Steve Jurss, Marcie Britton and Jaime Turner) as well as Neil, Tracy Hudson and Justin Wirth worked hard to streamline many of our operations and help improve the Birck culture. Outstanding initiatives by NSAC (e.g. during Covid-19 social distancing which was particularly hard for our students) are lessons that Birck’s main impact is our students and postdocs and we need to find ways to better engage them to shape our center.

In the last ten years, we have housed 20 new faculty from 8 academic units from 5 colleges to setup part or all of their research operations at the Birck Center. This required renovating or re-assigning >13,000 sq. ft. of cleanroom and lab space. Since 2012, we have invested ~$18M in new shared tools. About 1/3 of this is from our recurring facility and equipment replacement budget and 2/3 was through competing in internal Purdue competition (Engineering Preeminent Teams, EVPRP Equipment grants), as well as startup package of faculty who believe in Birck's shared labs. Several faculty have also brought equipment through external grants (MRI and DURIP).

During 2019-2020, we did a comprehensive planning for Birck 2.0 and the future needs for state-of-the-art nanofabrication and nanocharacterization at Purdue. The process was one-year long, engaged 35 faculty, 12 Department Heads, 5 Associate Deans for Research and 3 Deans. This resulted in a comprehensive 140-page report about facility needs and potential future centers of excellence. Some of this blueprint is the foundation of faculty initiatives in collaboration with PRF (Discovery Park District) that will hopefully leverage major federal funding through USICA (CHIPS and Endless Frontier Acts) and other sources.

Moving forward, my recommendation is that Birck will be stronger when more faculty, students and staff engage and take ownership in our operation and future vision activities. This is critical for a vibrant center. I plan to focus on SMART industry consortium, AI in Community initiative as well as the commercialization of a new semiconductor characterization technology. We just received an NSF ERC Planning grant focused on AI in Manufacturing that will hopefully help us keep the momentum and create a new center of excellence.

I would like to acknowledge the outstanding work of other previous and current Associate, Deputy and Scientific Directors: Zhihong Chen, Sunil Bhave, Yong Chen, Dana Weinstein, Dimitri Peroulis, Vlad Shalaev and Joerg Appenzeller as well as our Faculty Leadership Council (also including Rakesh Agrawal, Sasha Boltasseva, Miko Cakmak, Carol Handwerker, Mike Ladisch, Sophie Lelievre, Mark Lundstrom, Mike Manfra, Lisa Mauer, Jeff Rhoads, Haiyan Wang, and Alex Wei) who have played key roles to co-lead the center and help with several strategic initiatives.

Thanks for everybody’s support over the years. It is an honor to be part of the Birck family.

Best regards,
Ali


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </ECN/mailman/archives/bnc-all/attachments/20211124/0e631767/attachment.htm>