(Washington, D.C.)—The National Science Foundation (NSF) in August awarded $75.3 million for five new Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) that will develop cross-disciplinary research programs to advance technologies that address major societal problems and provide the basis for new industries.
NSF supports ERCs for a maximum of 10 years while the centers develop a strong network of collaborations with industry leaders and a base of financial support that can sustain the center after “graduation” from the NSF program.
Including the new awards, NSF supports 22 ERCs in the fields of bioengineering; earthquake engineering; design, manufacturing and processing systems; microelectronic and optical systems and information technology.
Prairie View A&M University will be a partner in the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), which will focus on synthetic biology, fabricating new biological components and assembling them into integrated, miniature devices and systems such as microbial drug factories or tools for seeking out and destroying cancerous tumors, pollutants or airborne warfare agents. Center researchers envision devices that incorporate “off-the-shelf” biological parts–whether enzymes, cells or even genetic circuits–with standardized connections that can even be integrated into non-biological systems.
The ERC will push synthetic biology engineering from time consuming, one-of-a-kind development efforts to the rapid creation of new products from standardized components. The efforts could impact the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, genetics and chemical fields, potentially leading to an entirely new landscape of diagnostic, therapeutic, and synthetic chemical industries.
SynBERC is based at the University of California at Berkeley. Other university partners will be Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The ERC will also partner with the University of California Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and the California Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate at Berkeley and UCSF to increase involvement of underrepresented minority students in the field.
The ERC has industry partners that include 12 firms committed to membership and representing suppliers of genetic tools and custom DNA components, pharmaceutical and chemical firms, and firms interested in developing simulation software and computational tools. Venture capital firms will advise SynBERC on start-up business opportunities.
Core partners for the other four engineering research centers are Carnegie
Mellon University (Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center);
University of Minnesota (Engineering Research Center for Compact and Efficient
Fluid Power); Princeton University (Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health
and the Environment) and Rutgers University (Engineering Research Center
for Structured Organic Composites). 