Today, the Pratt School of Engineering wraps up a three-day symposium that is functioning jointly as the groundbreaking ceremony for a new $100 million photonics center and as a declaration of Pratt's ambition to turn the Research Triangle into a "photon forest."
And although the Fitzpatrick Center for Advanced Photonics and Communications Systems will not be completed until 2003, the symposium previews the advancements it will bring.
"The grand opening is like our coming-out party," Engineering Dean Kristina Johnson said. "It will announce the center to the world and define the five laboratories that make up the center. It will be our kickoff meeting to attract industry sponsors, some of which have already signed up, and will focus the photonics and optics national attention on the East Coast."
The program-called "Photonics in the Forest"-kicked off Monday morning and will continue through tonight, with panel discussions, talks and demonstrations of leading-edge photonics technology. At Tuesday's events, Johnson and University President Nan Keohane announced a $2.75 million gift from Canadian-based Nortel Networks. The gift includes $1.5 million to create an endowment fund to support a new professorship and $1.25 million to support research at the Fitzpatrick Center.
"Nortel Networks' $2.75 million commitment to join the Fitzpatrick Center as a founding partner is a significant statement by one of the world's leading technology
The gift is a part of a larger effort by the school to make it the foremost leader in photonics. The symposium's title conveys the University's hope that the center will help make the Research Triangle a "photon forest," in which the local universities and the more than 300 fiberoptics and telecommunications companies will work together to become the Silicon Valley of photonics.
"In Pratt's strategic plan, [the Fitzpatrick Center] is huge, as photonics and communications is one of our strategic thrusts," Johnson said. "It will position the School of Engineering and the Department of [Electrical and Computer Engineering] to be at the forefront of the next wave of innovation in engineering and technology, using photons instead of only electrons to sense, transmit, store and display multi-dimensional imagery, for example."
In addition to the center, the "photon forest" plan calls for 20 interdisciplinary tenure-track faculty, 50 research assistants and more than 100 graduate students over the next four years. The center will also offer laboratories concentrating on a variety of research areas.
"The new center will allow us to get more and more undergraduates involved in research," said David Brady, visiting professor of electrical and computer engineering. "There will be more hands-on lab experiments, moving away from the purely theoretical."
A branch of optics engineering, photonics is the study of massless packets of light known as photons. Many experts think the field will lead to a faster, more effective Internet. At Pratt, photonics is one of the three main focus areas, and the new photonics resources will affect everyone there, Brady said.
"Photonics is the ultimate limit in how humans can manipulate science," he said. "We hope that the center will be the best place in the world to study photonics. Anyone who wants to study photonics will know this is the place to do it."
The 120,000-square-foot center, which will be located on Science Drive, is named after Duke alumni Michael and Patty Fitzpatrick, who gave the University a $25 million photonics grant-the third-largest gift in the school's history. The couple gave another $25 million to photonics research at Stanford.
Michael Fitzpatrick, director of NorthPoint Communications and former chair, CEO and president of the fiberoptic component manufacturer E-TEK Dynamics Inc., hopes the donations will significantly advance the study of optics and photonics nationwide and will encourage collaborative research between the East and West coasts.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.