UALR’s Nanotechnology Center has received a half-million dollar grant from the Small Business Administration to assist researchers at other state universities and Arkansas businesses to create significant innovations  using the new science of working with materials at the atomic level.  In addition, a small portion of the funding will be directed to support research that may lead to the founding of new businesses in Arkansas.

Tom Walker, UALR’s vice provost for innovation and commercialization, said the SBA grant totaling $493,615 will train scientists and researchers at other institutions to develop skills and knowledge needed to access the state-of-the-art instrumentation at UALR’s Nanotechnology Center.

“The grant will allow UALR to share access to the instrumentation and participate in research expected to have enormous application expanding businesses and creating new ones that are expected to grow out of the research of the center,” Walker said.

The program, titled the Innovation Technology Access Project (ITAP), is designed to demonstrate to both the higher education community and the business community methods of applying significant innovations to existing firms to improve their competitive position in the market place, he said.

Coordinated by the UALR Nanotechnology Center and UALR’s Arkansas Small Business Development Center, ITAP will provide non-UALR researchers access to a cluster of high-level instruments at the center, including, including a scanning electron microscope, a transmission electron microscope, Raman spectrometer, and other state-of-the-art instruments  being installed at UALR.

In 2005, UALR received approval from the governor and the legislature to spend $5.9 million in state General Improvement money to establish a nanotechnology center designed to capitalize on nanotechnology breakthroughs discovered at UALR. The appropriation is purchasing specialized equipment that will make UALR’s Nanotechnology Center the only state-of-the-art facility in the Mid-South that enables technical innovation on structures at the atomic level.

One example of such a structure, the carbon nanotube, is a one-atom thick sheet of graphite rolled up into a seamless cylinder. The  cylindrical carbon molecules have novel properties that make them potentially useful in a wide variety of applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat. Economists are estimating that the 12- to 15-year economic impact of nanotechnology is close to more than $1 trillion.

Last year, UALR hired Walker, known to business and industry executives worldwide as an expert in shepherding new scientific breakthroughs from private and public laboratories to commercial ventures, to direct the business side of the Nanotechnology Center. Dr. Alex Biris, a research professor in applied science, is the chief scientist of the nanotechnology lab at UALR.

Biris, 32, is recognized world wide as one of the experts in the new field of nanotechnology.  He has already published over 90 peer reviewed articles and has six patent applications.  He has provided the core technology that has led to the creation of the first commercial spin out of the Nanotechnology Center, Orlumet, LLC.

Walker, who came to UALR from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce, has been credited for building and leading organizations – some national in scope – to nurture and incubate scientific and technological research and move the ideas into the marketplace as commercial enterprises.