Three ECE Profs To Research Smart Lighting
10/7/2008
Smarter, "greener" lighting devices are the objective behind a new Engineering Research Center funded by the National Science Foundation, and UNM is providing the nanotechnology for the project.
ECE Professor Stephen Hersee is leading UNM's team, and he will serve as the Engineering Research Center's associate director. Forming Hersee's core team are two of his colleagues at UNM's Center for High Technology Materials, ECE Prof. Stephen Brueck, who is director of CHTM and a UNM Distinguished Professor, and ECE Prof. Marek Osinski, who holds a joint professorship with Physics & Astronomy.
UNM will receive between $4 million and $5 million for this research during the next five years. The other two core institutions in the project are Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the lead university, and Boston University.
The researchers will identify new ways to use light, applying it to purposes ranging from computer displays and autonomous control of vehicles to communications and health care. For instance:
Your room lights send and receive data and communicate with your PDA or computer.
Analysis of bio-samples becomes automated and rapid, cutting health-care costs.
Your automobile lights talk to the traffic lights and to other cars around you to warn you of traffic problems, eliminate red-light violations, and eventually help do the driving for you.
Your laptop battery really does last all day.
Your room lighting so accurately replicates sunlight that sunflowers follow it.
Your TV gives you a 3D, full-color image.
One project at UNM will be to develop a dime-sized, solid-state microscope that will function without lenses or moving parts. It will image as sharply as a regular microscope that is a thousand times larger.
Much of the transformational engineering in this program is so new that you can't find it in textbooks. So the center will work with local middle and high schools and with national and international educational partners to develop educational materials. These interactions will give budding engineers an exciting new career path. Young women and minorities will be encouraged to pursue this new area of engineering.
The center will also work closely with industry so that once the smart lighting technology is developed it can be used efficiently in new products. Government labs will also play a part, including Sandia National Laboratories. UNM students will get to see how this technology-transfer process works, and will also have opportunities to become entrepreneurs in the field.
UNM President David Schmidly was quoted in UNM Today as saying that "Our participation in this center offers a chance for our engineering students and faculty to create energy-saving technologies that will improve our society and create new business opportunities. We are particularly excited that this program will also have a strong focus on outreach, and we anticipate that the new field of smart lighting will increase the number and diversity of students entering science, math and engineering education."
Portions of this story are excerpted, with thanks, from a UNM Today story by Karen Wentworth.
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