CBC awards are funded through NSF's division of chemistry. Each award provides $1.5 million to the center over a three-year period. At the end of that time, those centers showing high potential will be eligible to continue their work with a Phase II award, which will provide $2 million to $3 million per year for up to five years. These awards are also potentially renewable for an additional five years.
The new CBC for molecular cybernetics, headed by Columbia's Milan N. Stojanovic, will have eight principal investigators from seven institutions: Columbia, Boston University, Caltech, the universities of Michigan, Chicago and New Mexico and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. The center's goal will be to produce synthetic molecular machines powered by chemical bond transformation. To achieve this, the researchers will synthesize chemical structures having two or more protruding appendages of DNA, each able to grab onto or let go of a surface in response to an external stimulus. This should allow the structure to move across the surface like a molecular "spider." If successful, the construction of such autonomously moving molecules would generate considerable scientific and public interest, and could lead to applications in areas such as drug delivery and nanopatterning.
The goal of UCI chemist Shaul Mukamel at his CBC is to get a better understanding of the inner workings of molecules. Mukamel will head a team of researchers from Irvine and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Using both theory and experiment, they will probe the real-time inner workings of molecules at single-atom resolution, with the goal of illuminating elementary chemical events such as the gain and loss of an electron from a single molecule, the making and breaking of chemical bonds and the transport of charge among molecules. Ultimately, these investigations should lead to real-space, real-time pictures of chemical processes at the most fundamental level -- in effect, time-lapse sequences of chemical events as they occur.
For more information, visit: www.nsf.gov