As soldiers bring more technology than ever onto the Iraqi battlefields, the U.S. Department of Defense is continuing to send university researchers into the lab to develop new technologies useful to the military.
In early March the Defense department awarded $27 million in grants to 75 academic institutions for the purpose of purchasing equipment, and Northwestern received a $292,800 piece of the pie. The funding was part of the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program.
“The (Defense department) puts out calls for proposals every year looking for high-risk innovative research that could impact their program needs and university needs,” said chemistry Prof. Richard Van Duyne, whose NU research group received the grant money.
NU’s Office of Strategic Initiatives provides guidance and direction in a number of the larger programs that the department is interested in funding, said Sam Musa, who directs the office.
“Some of our most prominent faculty are engaged in this research and they provide the most innovative and dynamic research for (the Defense department),” he wrote in an e-mail Tuesday.
The grant will help fund equipment for Van Duyne’s research group, which aims to develop sensory technologies at the nanoscale that could detect substances from samples as small as one molecule. The project is also funded by another grant from the Defense department under the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, which supports several research projects at NU.
Van Duyne said the new equipment includes a thin film deposition tool, used to deposit materials on surfaces in thin, uniform films, and a scanned-probe microscope, which allows the 3-D visualization of individual atoms on a surface.
The capacity to make sensors for the nanoscale might make it possible to develop early alert systems for a bioweapons attack, identify causes of microchip malfunctions or even create tiny health monitoring systems for soldiers.
“This is one of the best examples of how nanoscale science can be put to practical use,” Van Duyne said. “I see our mission as basically getting the most information from the smallest bit of material.”
Chemistry Prof. George Schatz said the new instrumentation will help scientists better understand the tiny materials and technologies they are working with.
“The kind of expertise and expectations from the grant will allow us to sort this out and ultimately teach us whether we’ll be able to use this as a way of replacing the current generation of sensors,” Schatz said.
Although military officials hope the research done at NU and other universities will translate into scientific advances on the battlefield, the research is general enough to be useful in other commercial and academic applications.
Defense department grants are valuable because they give much-needed support to the physical sciences, Van Duyne said. Most funding opportunities are devoted to the life sciences, but the military invests millions of dollars a year in funding university research, often in the physical sciences.
Without the department money, projects like Van Duyne’s wouldn’t occur, Schatz said.
“The kinds of experiments that we do are relatively expensive science,” he said. “Nevertheless, this is where the technological breakthroughs are.”
