Dear all, In our continuing effort to keep improving the user experience and productivity at BNC we were thinking of revising our current nearly-random grad student/postdoc office assignment to a more theme-based assignment. The current process has been in place since the beginning of BNC in 2005. At that time it was an effective way to encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations. More than 8 years later we may need to revise this based on our current research interests and needs. For example, we have heard from many researchers that they would like to be collocated with other researchers from different academic units that share similar interests. This is one of the main Discovery Park ideas as well. Most of us benefit greatly from theme-based cross-disciplinary collaborations and we believe that graduate students and postdocs would share the same experience. In addition, we would like to foster strong collaborations between theoreticians/modelers and experimentalists. For example, some of the nano-themes that these communities could benefit one another could be (alphabetically) bio-sensors, electronics, energy transport, photonics, photovoltaics, just to name a few. We would appreciate if you could please give some thought to this and provide some feedback. We would also be very happy to discuss this in a BNC faculty meeting in July should we receive such feedback. We would like to be ready to either make changes or keep things the same before the new semester starts in August. Thanks Dimitri ________________________________________________________________________________ Dimitrios Peroulis Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Deputy Director, Birck Nanotechnology Center Purdue University 1205 West State Street West Lafayette, IN 47907-2057 tel: (765) 494-3491, fax: (765) 494-4731 email: dperouli@purdue.edu<mailto:dperouli@purdue.edu> http://sites.google.com/site/peroulisteam/ ________________________________________________________________________________