Dear Colleagues, Next week, we will have meetings about future centers of excellence leveraging Birck researchers and assets (see attached some initial ideas but this is not exhaustive). We will discuss about: (1) grant opportunities for small group proposals as well as major centers. (2) being ahead of the curve, identify funding priorities, help create new programs. (3) ideas about potential future centers of excellences (which societal grand challenges? why Purdue? top competitors? target funding sources?) If you haven’t done so already, please let Jaime know if you would like to participate at either or both of the meetings below and Jaime will share the zoom invite(s): * Wednesday Dec. 16, 12-1:30pm (health, ag/food, biomedical, water, soft materials/R2R manufacturing) * Thursday Dec. 17, 12-1:30pm (computing, communications, energy, micro/nano fabrication; quantum and AI) We look forward to hear from you. Best regards, Ali and Zhihong On Dec 2, 2020, at 2:36 AM, Shakouri, Ali <shakouri@purdue.edu<mailto:shakouri@purdue.edu>> wrote: Dear Colleagues, Birck's key strength, beyond a shared resource with the latest state-of-the-art tools and expert staff, is bringing together more than 500 students and faculty from diverse disciplines. It will be good to think and brainstorm about our long term impact and how we can nucleate future centers of excellence at Purdue. We know that to be successful, we should be proactive before call for center proposals come out (e.g. NSF STC, ERC, MRSEC; NIH; DoE EFRC; DoD or USDA).. We are all very busy at the end of a very unusual semester due to COVID-19. On the other hand, we should not lose sight that some of the initiatives with major impact for many generations (e.g. Morrill Act to establish land-grant universities and the establishment of national academy of science) were signed at very difficult times during the civil war. Last year more than 50 faculty were engaged in the planning for Birck Annex. As a follow up, Zhihong and I had one-to-one meetings with more than 20 department heads, associate deans for research and deans. Through these conversations, we identified couple of potential areas for future centers of excellence (see the attached viewgraphs). This list is not exhaustive but some initial ideas. Of course, with the current financial pressures, it is hard to think about Birck building expansion. Building and equipment are just tools, they should be consequences of our initiatives. If you are interested to be engaged in the discussion about future centers of excellence, I encourage you to attend one or both of the following virtual meetings: * Wednesday Dec. 16, 12-1:30pm (health, ag/food, biomedical, and water) * Thursday Dec. 17, 12-1:30pm (computing, communications, and energy; quantum and AI) Please let Jaime know if you are able to participate and which meetings. We plan to share additional brainstorming documents together with the zoom invitation. Also don’t hesitate to share your ideas about potential future centers of excellences (which societal grand challenges we can address? why Purdue? what are our top competitors and what others are doing? which future funding sources?) We look forward to hear from you. Best regards, Ali and Zhihong PS. Latest BNC faculty meeting viewgraphs: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ts0x1ouuen34v5b/BNC_Faculty_Nov_2020print.pdf?dl=0 Some ideas from Birck 2050: Conference of the Future: https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/2050/ <FutureBirck_Dec2020.pdf>