Recently, the Beckman Institute was chosen as headquarters for two important new centers dedicated to nanoscale research - one geared toward medical applications such as bio-batteries and another concerned with electromechanical systems like switches. Both centers are highly interdisciplinary and represent vigorous collaborations between multiple universities.

That Beckman was selected to be home to the centers is a testament to the faculty members involved in the projects, but it can also be seen as evidence of another crucial component of the Institute's research mission: change.

The centers are part of Beckman's Molecular and Electronic Nanostructures (M&ENS) research initiative, which was first formed in 1994. It was a groundbreaking research theme a dozen years ago and the fact that these centers, created through large, focused funding initiatives from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, are now a part of M&ENS shows that this research initiative continues to evolve and remain relevant.

Within the past year M&ENS underwent a reorganization that saw the creation of two new groups, a name change for two others, and a realignment of some faculty members into different groups that reflect the continuous and fast-changing developments in nanoscale research.

Beckman Director Pierre Wiltzius said change and growth are essential to making scientific research work.

"If you look at what research has flourished and grown compared to what M&ENS was five years ago, you will notice a number of differences," Wiltzius said. "Hopefully that will always be the case. If we take a snapshot now and we look at what we will be five years from now, we want the picture to reflect innovation and change."

Pierre Wiltzius

Wiltzius said there are several reasons for changing Beckman's research foci, such as happened with the reorganization of M&ENS. Some of those reasons include faculty changes, new developments in technology and research trends, and new research topics brought about by recent discoveries. Those factors all applied to the M&ENS reorganization.

"If we look at the old research groups, they had grown and evolved in all sorts of different directions that were no longer in alignment with what the groups were called," Wiltzius said.

One example is the Autonomous Materials Systems group, headed by Scott White, which evolved from the Advanced Chemical Systems (ACS) group. Investigating autonomic materials grew into an extremely successful research line for ACS, so members involved in that area formed the new group, while others became key players in one of two new groups, either 3-D Micro and Nanosystems (3-DMN) or Bioimaging Science and Technology (BST).

The Nanoelectronics and Biophotonics (NB) group is now the Nanoelectronics group, headed by Joe Lyding, with the members involved in biophotonics research joining BST. With its researchers' focus on bioimaging, the BST group was made part of the Biological Intelligence research initiative.

"It's clear that bioimaging and neuroimaging have grown from what they were just five years ago," Wiltzius said. "More importantly, as very much an interdisciplinary research field that draws from many different departments across campus, it needs a home and the Beckman Institute has turned out to be a very natural home for it. So we concur with the Provost and the Vice-Chancellor for Research that bioimaging and neuroimaging as a subgroup are very much centered at the Beckman Institute."

The two new nanoscale centers are both part of the new Computational Multiscale Nanosystems (CMN) group, led by Umberto Ravaioli. Research based on computational methodologies and their ever-increasing processing power has exploded in recent years. M&ENS already boasts a world leader in biophysical computational methods with its Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group, headed by Klaus Schulten.