June 2007 Directors' Meeting

Major Agenda topics: NRC MRSEC Report; Discussion of NRC report with MRSEC program managers. ACI from the perspective of a large company: du Pont; Bob de Groot, Caltech, Informal Science Education Network; ACI from the perspective of a startup company: Platypus Technologies; ACI from the perspective of a startup company: Raindance Technologies. Discussion with representative from Dupont, Platypus and Raindance MIT, Cambridge, MA

Agenda

Background of participants:

Lance Haworth joined the National Science Foundation???s Division of Materials Research (DMR) in 1984 as the first program director for materials research groups. He then served as the program director for NSF???s Materials Research Laboratories and led the planning and implementation of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) Program. He served as the executive officer for DMR from 1996-2006, and was appointed acting director of the DMR in February 2006. Haworth was educated at Liverpool University, the University of Alberta, and Yale University. He was a postdoctoral research associate in metallurgy at the University of Illinois. He was a faculty member of the Wayne State Metallurgical Engineering Department from 1972-1985. A visiting scientist at Central Solar Energy Research Corporation in Detroit, Michigan, Haworth then served as vice president from 1978-1979. His research activities focused on fatigue-damage mechanisms, structure-property relationships in materials, and nondestructive evaluation. Matthew Tirrell is Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his undergraduate education in Chemical Engineering at Northwestern University and his Ph.D. in 1977 in Polymer Science from the University of Massachusetts. From 1977 to 1999 he was on the faculty of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, where he served as head of the department from 1995 to 1999. His research has been in polymer surface properties including adsorption, adhesion, surface treatment, friction, lubrication and biocompatibility. He has co-authored about 250 papers and one book and has supervised about 60 Ph.D. students. E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company was founded in July 1802 as a gun powder mill by Eleuth??re Ir??б©n??б©e du Pont on Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware, USA. DuPont is currently the world's second largest chemical company (behind BASF) in terms of market capitalization and third (behind BASF and Dow Chemical) in revenue. It is also a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In the twentieth century, DuPont led the polymer revolution by developing many highly successful materials such as Vespel, neoprene, nylon, Corian, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, M5 fiber, Nomex, Tyvek and Lycra. DuPont has also been significantly involved in the refrigerant industry, developing and producing the Freon (CFCs) series and later, more environmentally-friendly refrigerants. In the paint and pigment industry, it has created synthetic pigments and paints, such as ChromaFlair. The presentation will be given by Dr. Randolph J. Guschl, Director of the DuPont Center for Collaborative Research and Education. Platypus Technologies was founded in April 2000, with the goal of becoming a leader in the analytic and life sciences arena by combining nano-scale materials science with liquid crystal technology. The company began operation in July of 2001 with 5 employees in the University Research Park in Madison, Wisconsin. Through the commercialization of its outstanding science technology and the obtainment of federal funding, the company has achieved tremendous growth. The company is located within the New Venture Center in the Fitchburg Technology Campus in Madison. The presentation will be given by Dr. Barbara Israel, one of the founders of Platypus. RainDance Technologies is a nanotechnology company devoted to discovering, developing, and commercializing the precise manipulation of minute amounts of fluids in microfluidics devices for a variety of industrial and research applications. The company was founded to commercialize technology developed at Harvard by MRSEC-supported research, and the chief technical person is a former MRSEC-supported post doc at Harvard. The company was initially funded by Jonathan Rothberg, who also started CuraGen and 454 life Sciences. Based in Guilford, Raindance is combining droplet technology with microfluidics to enable a vast number of analytical reactions to take place using extremely low volumes of reagents in microscopic droplets ??? dubbed NanoReactors ??? by Raindance. The technology hinges on the ability to generate, split, merge, recombine and sort droplets with absolute precision, while simultaneously performing optical interrogation of the droplets' contents. The company recently raised $23.7M in funding and currently employs over 35 people.

Location

The hotel is the Boston Marriott Cambridge at 2 Cambridge Center, right next to the MIT Campus. Below is the link to MIT Campus maps and the hotel. The meeting will be in the MIT Stata Center - room 32-141. MIT Campus Maps | Marriott If you have any special dietary needs, please feel free to send me an email and we will make sure to take care of your request. If there is anything else we can do for you at MIT, please feel free to send me an email at sdalton@mit.edu or give me a call at 1-617-253-7632.