UCI gets $20 million to videotape molecules

The Orange County Register

August 17th, 2009

By Gary Robbins, science writer-editor

V. Ara Apkarian will lead UCI's efforts to videotape molecules.
Image by Daniel A. Anderson, UCI.

The UC Irvine chemistry department has been awarded $20 million to try to find a way to make real-time videos of molecules, an achievement that would greatly advance nanoscience, a field devoted to assembling tiny devices that could do everything for diagnose disease to build better computers.

The National Science Foundation is giving the money to UCI’s Chemistry at Space-Time Limit, a research center that includes such prominent figures as chemist V. Ara Apkarian, and Wilson Ho, a renowned microscopy expert.

Apkarian, who’ll lead the research center, says, “The purpose here is to look at the microscopic scale at how chemistry works. How molecule bonds form and are broken apart, which is the essence of chemistry.

“If we can do this, we can engineer chemistry to do what we want. It would become possible to engineer a single molecules into a radio, or create medical applications that sense antibodies. I call this atomistic engineering.

“One of the most important targets we will pursue will be creating better solar energy collectors and converters. It’s a very complicated area of science that we don’t understand well. If we can crack this problem, we can build better photo-voltaics and better photo cells.”