EXTREME LAB MAKEOVER. Yearlong $3.5 million renovations to the Nanotechnology Research and Teaching Facility have added four pieces of equipment that will greatly increase research capabilities. They are an ion beam system that designs, generates, analyzes and characterizes patterns for nano devices; a scanning electron microscope capable of viewing and manipulating sub-nanometer objects; a laser deposition system capable of six-target pulsed laser deposition; and a vacuum scanning tunneling microscope with surface engineering and science capabilities. Facility renovations, valued at more than $1 million, added two wet chemical labs, two optoelectronics labs, a nano-giga electronic lab, a cryoelectronics lab, a nano-device lab and individual labs to accommodate the new equipment. Three more pieces of equipment will be installed this academic year. Electrical engineering Professor Zeynep Celik-Butler, director of the facility, says the improvements will not only aid faculty and students but encourage use by commercial researchers.

PLEASURE AND PAIN. Psychology Department Chair Robert Gatchel has received the American Academy of Pain Management’s 2006 John Liebeskind Pain Management Research Award for his research of interdisciplinary pain management. He has conducted extensive clinical research, much of it supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, on the assessment, treatment and prevention of chronic medical disorders, with an emphasis on chronic pain. Dr. Gatchel is also the clinical research program director of the Eugene McDermott Pain Management Center at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. His revolutionary biopsychosocial approach to pain management, which treats the individual as a whole, is proving more effective than traditional medicine because many diseases have no known cure. “Dr. Gatchel’s contributions to the field of pain management are unmatched,” said Bob Gant of Lighthouse Clinical Services in Dallas, who nominated Gatchel for the award.

MINING FOR DATA. Computer science and engineering Professors Larry Holder and Diane Cook have received three grants totaling more than $700,000 to continue their pioneering work in graph-based data mining using the Subdue system. The funding includes a $352,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to use graph-based data mining to analyze public health data, construct a toolset to provide early detection of health epidemics and other related work. The Air Force has funded $253,000 for the design and evaluation of new methods for performing pattern learning on structured data represented as graphs and the evaluation of their application to structural relational databases. The remaining $119,000 comes from the Naval Research Laboratory to employ the Subdue system in security research to identify threats.

WHEN UNIVERSITIES COLLIDE. Physics Professor Andy White established a research collaboration with Tsinghua University during a visit to Beijing last summer. The agreement with the Tsinghua Physics Department focuses on the International Linear Collider, a planned 30-kilometer-long facility that Dr. White calls the next generation of particle accelerators. Teams from the universities will build and test prototype sections of a calorimeter system based on gas electron multiplier (GEM) technology, which has potential applications in security and medicine. It’s the first time this technology has been used in this application. Regular exchange visits are planned between the institutions. White leads UT Arlington’s High Energy Physics group, which explores the structure of matter at the smallest distance scales and the forces between the smallest components of matter. As part of this work, the group is designing a portion of a detector system for the International Linear Collider. HEP members also are participating in the DZero Experiment at Fermilab, which discovered the “top quark” in 1995. DZero studies the interactions of protons and antiprotons at the highest available energies.