UNR bets on nanotechnology

When Nevada Ventures LLC, the Reno-based venture capital company, provided a $300,000 grant to jump-start nanoscience research at the University of Nevada, Reno, it didn't expect an economic payoff.

But investors in the venture fund and researchers in the two-year-old Nevada Ventures Nanoscience Program hope the effort might mean that northern Nevada someday will become one of the centers of a nanotechnology industry with worldwide revenues in the billions of dollars.

The program's administrators leveraged the $300,000 grant from Nevada Ventures into $2.1 million in research awards and matching funds from UNR's Applied Research Initiative program.

Today, some 40 people work with the Nevada Venture Nanoscience Program.

They're joined in their research by about 35 graduate and undergraduate students.

Visionaries say nanotechnology, the process of building materials molecule-bymolecule, someday might be used in applications ranging from more powerful computer chips to spoons with sensors that "read" a consumer's breath and tell him what foods he needs to eat for optimal health.

"It's hard to find what it won't touch," said Jesse Adams, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UNR and the leader of the school's nanoscience program.

Working in laboratories at Stead, researchers in the UNR program tare investigating ways to use nanotechnology to make faster computer chips.Other research focuses on "nanotubes," carbonbased materials of great strength that can be either a semiconductor or a metal.

Down the hall, a clean room is under construction to allow researchers, both from the university and from outside agencies and companies, to put nanomaterials to use.

"This is the machine shop of the future," said Adams.

Development of the clean room known around the lab as a "NanoFabrication Facility" is under the direction of Roger Mora, a veteran of similar efforts for Silicon Valley manufacturers.

Despite Nevada Ventures' investment in the nanotechnology effort, no one expects an immediate effect on the northern Nevada economy.

Commercial applications of the technology better automotive paints, improved cosmetics have been few so far, and Adams said at least four or five years will elapse before consumers see significant contributions from the new technology.

Defense and aerospace applications, however, are closer to reality, and 71 percent of the program's research funding has come from federal sources.

Corporate sponsors paid another 20 percent.

Robb Smith, the general partner with Nevada Ventures LLC, said the venture capital company's investors look at its $300,000 contribution as philanthropy rather than an investment.

Major shifts in the economy come along rarely, and Smith believes nanotechnology will represent a shift as important and as long-lived as the computer revolution.

As that paradigm shift unfolds, Nevada Ventures LLC believes UNR and its nanotechnology research program might provide the power behind a major new industry in the area just as Stanford's research labs provided the impetus for Silicon Valley.

"UNR could be the Stanford or the Berkeley of its niche," Smith said.

The lab, he said, also will be important in attracting top-flight students to UNR.

And that, too, will be important in developing nanotechnology industries in the region because companies will be looking for a highly skilled workforce.

Nevada Ventures LLC will get a first look at any commercially viable applications that might arise from the UNR nanoscience research.

The venture capital funding, Adams said, allowed the laboratory to hit the ground running.

As one small example, he cited his ability to hire an administrative assistant an increasingly rare bird around universities and that freed him to build a team of scientists and make a pitch for research funding.

That team alsois scoring points in the academic world.

Adams said researchers have 17 scientific papers in preparation.