About NASCENT

Dr. Steve Brueck - Lifetime Achievement Award, Endowment Fund in His Honor

Dr. Brueck has been honored by UNM Rainforest Innovations with its first lifetime achievement award and in addition the UNM Foundation has created an endowment fund in his name to benefit the Center for High Technology Materials. These honors are in recognition for his prolific inventiveness and tremendous contributions to the University of New Mexico.

NASCENT researchers honored by NSF I-Corps

NASCENT Researchers, Dr. Juan Faria-Briceno & Dr. Steve Brueck (UNM faculty member), and their business mentor, Scot Moye, recently participated in an NSF Innovation Corps experience centered on commercialization of the In-Line Scatterometry technology targeted for application in nanoscale featured web manufacturing that the researchers have been developing over the past year. Their efforts were warmly received by their peers and by industry as well, so they were formally recognized with the '“Cohort” Award for highest level of achievement'.

The system can perform a single point inspection while accommodating web movement speeds up to 0.5 meter per second (demonstrated experimentally, publication pending) and up to 3.2 meters per second theoretically. The In-line Scatterometer can resolve critical dimension at the nano-scale (as small as 20 nm for wire grid polarizer structures), as published in AIP early this year https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5092802.
Thin films, 1D aluminum undercut, and 2D Silicon Nanotubes (NASCENT Sample) structures have been assessed to demonstrate application breadth, as published in AVS last year https://avs.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1116/1.5119707.

The resulting collaborations, letters of support, and invitations to present to major equipment manufacturers will become part of their pending Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) grant proposal. NASCENT celebrates their success and highly recommends the NSF I-Corps program to all those with an entrepreneurial spirit and an idea whose commercial application should be explored.

Ramin Sabbagh wins Peoples Choice at the UT 3 Minute Thesis competition

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition celebrates the exciting research conducted by graduate students. Developed by The University of Queensland (UQ), the exercise cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills. The competition supports their capacity to effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. NASCENT's Ramin Sabbagh is among the three person's honored in the 2020-2021 competition.

Dr. Kristianto Tjiptowidjojo has been awarded the prestigious L. E. Scriven Young Investigator award

Dr. Kristianto Tjiptowidjojo, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of New Mexico, has been awarded the prestigious L. E. Scriven Young Investigator award from the The International Society of Coating Science and Technology (ISCST) at this year’s virtual event.

The L.E. Scriven Young Investigator Award is given in recognition of outstanding sustained achievements or one-time breakthroughs in the area of continuous liquid film coating science and technology. Those nominated for this award must be forty years old or younger at the time of the award. The award (a plaque and $500) was presented at the Honors Luncheon of the 20th ISCST Symposium, September 20-23, 2020, Minneapolis, MN.

The International Society of Coating Science and Technology (ISCST) is a technical society that was formed in December of 1996 by an international group of academic and industrial engineers who believed that the global coating technical community would benefit by having its own society.

Record Setting RF Switch Made from 2D Material (hBN) Demonstrated

UT Researchers from NASCENT and the Microelectronics Research Center, in conjunction with colleges at the University of Lille have published performance data for their novel RF switch in Nature Electronics (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-0416-x), demonstrating superlative energy efficiency and data transmission at 100 GHz frequency. This demonstrates a pathway to greater still communication speed and ubiquity.