Dear All, I am delighted to announce that Sunil Bhave will be the Birck Associate Director for Operations and Zhihong Chen will be the Birck Associate Director for Research starting from July 1st. I would like to thank the great efforts of the search committee: Alina Alexeenko (Aero), Joerg Appenzeller (ECE), Sasha Boltasseva (ECE), Bryan Boudouris (ChemE), Miko Cakmak (MSE/ME), Lisa Mauer (Food Science), and Ram Subramanian (Biology, Bindley Director). Birck facility is serving more than 500 users a year from 150 research groups. Together with Zhihong and Sunil, we plan to continue and expand several operational excellence initiatives that Dana and Dimitri Peroulis have started. Another key focus is to broaden our engagement across campus and help nucleate interdisciplinary research groups that can be the basis of national and international centers of excellence. We plan to expand the partnership with industry and increase our visibility/ communications with several initiatives that Neil Dilley, Tracy Hudson and Jaime Turner will start this summer. We have recently installed several state-of-the-art tools with outstanding support from Tomas, EVPRP and Provost. We have had great progress in our traditional areas of strengths in electronics and photonics through College of Engineering's preeminent teams and Engineering Focus Conversations. We have increased our visibility and broadened participation at Birck through Mike Manfra’s Microsoft Station Q and Yong’s quantum initiatives (CoE and CoS). Through SMART industry consortium and Wabash Heartland Innovation Network (WHIN), we work closely with EE systems (CISE), CS, Agriculture, Polytechnic and Krannert Global Supply Chain Institute. Our previous initiatives, LyoHUB (CoE and Pharmacy) and 3D cell culture facility (Vet Med), continue their strong activities. The former has now 23 company members who come to Birck regularly. During last year, with great support by Sorin Matei (Associate Dean in College of Liberal Arts), we started to work with CLA through storytelling competition, Sasha's and Dana’s image/display competition as well as Purdue 2050 Conference of the Future (collaborating with Art and Design and Krannert Business Analytics). If you would like to learn more about these initiatives or if you have any suggestions or comments about our operation or research, please let me or others in the leadership team know. We have an opportunity to increase our impact and take Birck to the next level but this requires broad participation and ownership of everybody in the Birck community working closely with other centers in DP and in close coordination with academic units. I would like to thank sincerely our former Associate Directors, Dana Weinstein and Yong Chen, for their outstanding service. As many of you already know, Dana is the new Associate Dean for Graduate Education in College of Engineering and Yong is the Director of the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute which is headquartered at Birck. I hope you have a great weekend. Best regards, Ali Ali Shakouri Mary Jo and Robert L. Kirk Director Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Birck Nanotechnology Center, Room 1027 Purdue University 1205 West State Street West Lafayette, IN 47907-2057 (765) 496-6105; Fax: (765) 496-8299 shakouri@purdue.edu<mailto:shakouri@purdue.edu>