Science Research Groups

The Joint Global Change Research Institute houses an interdisciplinary team dedicated to understanding the problems of global climate change and their potential solutions. Joint Institute staff bring decades of experience and expertise to bear in science, technology, economics, and policy. One of the strengths of the Joint Institute is a network of domestic and international collaborators that encourages the development of global and equitable solutions to the climate change problem. Initiated in early 2001, the Joint Institute brings together the intersecting interests of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland. Staff at the Joint Institute are focused on developing new opportunities to train university students in these interdisciplinary areas.

Physics at Berkeley has long been in the forefront of discovery and achievement. In 1931, Ernest O. Lawrence invented the cyclotron at Berkeley, ushering in the era of high-energy physics and a tradition of achievement that continues today. Seven of Berkeleys nineteen Nobel Prizes were awarded to Berkeley physicists. The most recent National Research Council nationwide rankings identify the Department as one of the best in the nation. In their pursuit of original research, physics faculty members collaborate with postdoctoral fellows, PhD graduate students, undergraduate students, and visiting scholars. Research opportunities exist for investigating a wide range of topics in theoretical and experimental physics including astrophysics, atomic physics, molecular physics, biophysics, condensed matter, cosmic rays, elementary particles and fields, energy and resources, fusion and plasma, geochronology, general relativity, low temperature physics, mathematical physics, nuclear physics, optical and laser spectroscopy, space physics, and statistical mechanics.

The Berkeley Cosmology Group is comprised of instrument builders, experimentalists, observers and theorists from the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Lab and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. We bring together a wide array of talents and techniques to address topics ranging from cosmological probes of fundamental physics to the formation and evolution of galaxies and large scale structure.

Perimeter Institute is a community of theoretical physicists dedicated to extending theories of space, time and matter. Perimeter Institute began in the summer of 1999 when Mike Lazaridis, founder and Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM) maker of the successful BlackBerryTM found himself in a position to help foster research and innovation in Canada. Howard Burton, a PhD graduate from the University of Waterloo, was hired by Mike as Executive Director in August of that year to best determine how a world-class organization devoted to theoretical physics would take shape. In just five years, Perimeter researchers have contributed over 500 meaningful, peer-reviewed, scientific findings and transferred this knowledge to all manner of partners in the entire research chain. Their current areas of cross-disciplinary research include: Foundations of Quantum Theory, Quantum Information Theory, Quantum Gravity, Superstring Theory, Particle Physics, Cosmology.

Here you'll discover the marine life and extraordinary habitats that make up your nation's marine sanctuaries and our continuing effortts to conserve these ocean and coastal treasures. The mission of NOAA's National Marine Sanctuaries is to serve as the trustee for the nation's system of marine protected areas, to conserve, protect, and enhance their biodiversity, ecological integrity and cultural legacy.

The Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC) brings together scientists from throughout Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to find interdisciplinary solutions to fundamental research questions about the human brain. Two key themes underlie research at BIAC. The first is to improve research techniques in neuroimaging, through improvements in MR pulse sequence design, applications to high-field fMRI, experimental control, and understanding of brain hemodynamics. Second, BIAC researchers investigate the functional properties of the human brain by incorporating these state-of-the-art research techniques into studies of cognitive processing. BIAC researchers investigate the organization of visual cortex, the cortical control of attention, brain circuits involved with learning and memory, among many other research topics.

The Environmental And Remote TecHnologies Laboratory provides support to Brown University's research and academic activities as they relate to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS).

The Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP) is a consortium of the Drosophila Genome Center, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Cancer Institute, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, through its support of work in the Gerald Rubin, Allan Spradling, Roger Hoskins, Hugo Bellen, Susan Celniker, and Gary Karpen laboratories. The goals of the Drosophila Genome Center are to finish the sequence of the euchromatic genome of Drosophila melanogaster to high quality and to generate and maintain biological annotations of this sequence. In addition to genomic sequencing, the BDGP is 1) producing gene disruptions using P element-mediated mutagenesis on a scale unprecedented in metazoans; 2) characterizing the sequence and expression of cDNAs; and 3) developing informatics tools that support the experimental process, identify features of DNA sequence, and allow us to present up-to-date information about the annotated sequence to the research community.

The California Biodiversity Center (CBC) is an Organized Research Unit of the University of California Berkeley that fosters collaborations between the Berkeley Natural History Museums, Berkeley's Natural History Field Stations, and other partners studying changes in California's biological diversity, past, present, and future. The mission of the California Biodiversity Center is to contribute to our understanding of the natural history of California by increasing interaction between museum-oriented scientists investigating the historical underpinnings of biodiversity, and field-oriented scientists investigating contemporary processes influencing organisms and ecosystems.

The Center for Environmental and Applied Fluid Mechanics (CEAFM) fosters research and teaching involving fluid mechanics by bringing together students, faculty, and researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and the Applied Physics Laboratory. Research areas of the CEAFM faculty and students include fluid flow phenomena in engineering and science covering a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. This includes fluid flows that occur in industrial, transportation, and manufacturing applications, in ocean and coastal engineering, in the treatment of aquatic and air-borne contaminants, in planetary atmospheres and oceans, rivers, subsurface waters, and fluids deep in the earth's interior, in biological systems, and in the microscopic environments relevant to micro-fluidic engineering applications and to aquatic and atmospheric chemistry and biology.

About 80 percent of the U.S. population live in metropolitan areas. These urban residents face a number of pressing environmental problems including exposure to toxic chemicals from contaminated sites, landfills, incinerators, abandoned industrial sites (Brownfields), industrial releases, lead, and pesticide use. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the Hazardous Substance Research Centers (HSRC) Program to develop better, more cost-effective, faster, and safer methods to assess and clean-up environments contaminated with hazardous substances. Johns Hopkins University has received an award from EPA as the lead institution for a new HSRC.

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission is the first launch in the Discovery Program, a NASA initiative for small planetary missions, with a maximum 3-year development cycle and a cost capped at $150 million in FY 1992 dollars. The NEAR mission is managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, MD. As the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, the NEAR mission promises to answer fundamental questions about the nature and origin of near-Earth objects, such as the numerous asteroids and comets in the vicinity of Earth's orbit. On Monday, 12 February 2001, the NEAR spacecraft touched down on asteroid Eros, after transmitting 69 close-up images of the surface during its final descent.

Prof. Mao's research interest is in the design, synthesis and application of polymeric materials for drug and gene delivery and tissue engineering.

FUSE is a NASA-supported astrophysics mission that was launched on June 24, 1999, to explore the Universe using the technique of high-resolution spectroscopy in the far-ultraviolet spectral region. The Johns Hopkins University has the lead role in developing and now operating the mission, in collaboration with The University of Colorado at Boulder, The University of California at Berkeley, international partners the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the French Space Agency (CNES), and corporate partners. FUSE is part of NASA's Origins Program under the auspices of NASA's Office of Space Science.

The Institute sponsors programs which encourage the growth and development of the emerging field of quantum information science. Quantum information science (QIS) is a new field of science and technology which draws upon the disciplines of physical science, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Its aim is to understand how fundamental physical laws can be harnessed to dramatically improve the acquisition, transmission, and processing of information.

SAMSI is a national institute whose vision is to forge a new synthesis of the statistical sciences and the applied mathematical sciences with disciplinary science to confront the very hardest and most important data- and model-driven scientific challenges. SAMSI achieves profound impact on both research and people by bringing together researchers who would not otherwise interact, and focusing the people, intellectual power and resources necessary for simultaneous advances in the statistical sciences and applied mathematical sciences that lead to ultimate resolution of the scientific challenges.

The primary mission of the IMA is to increase the impact of mathematics by fostering research of a truly interdisciplinary nature, linking mathematics of the highest caliber and important scientific and technological problems from other disciplines and industry. Allied with this mission, the IMA also aims to expand and strengthen the talent base engaged in mathematical research applied to or relevant to such problems. The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications was established in 1982 by the National Science Foundation, as a result of a national competition.

The MDSP lab conducts research in the general areas of multidimensional and multiresolution signal and image processing and estimation and geometric-based estimation. The applications that motivate this research include, but are not limited to, problems arising in automatic target detection and recognition, geophysical inverse problems (such as finding oil and analyzing the atmosphere), and medical estimation problems (such as tomography and MRI). Our general goal is to develop efficient methods for the extraction of information from diverse data sources in the presence of uncertainty. The approach we take is based on the development of statistical models for both observations and prior knowledge and the subsequent use of these models for optimal or near-optimal processing. The laboratory, directed by Professor W. Clem Karl, is part of the Information Systems and Sciences Group at Boston University, which is affiliated with the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Departments at Boston University.

The Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) is a multi-university NSF ERC founded in 2000. Its mission is to revolutionize the existing technology for detecting and imaging biomedical, environmental, or geophysical objects or conditions that lie underground or underwater, or are embedded in the human body. The Center's unified, multidisciplinary approach combines expertise in wave physics (photonics, ultrasonic, electromagnetic,..), sensor engineering, image processing, and inverse scattering to create new sensing modalities and prototypes that may be transitioned to industry partners for further development. A key element of the CenSSIS education mission is to immerse students in efforts to solve important real-world problems such as noninvasive breast cancer detection or underground pollution assessment.

The development of nonclassical sources of light that rely on the quantum nature of the electromagnetic field has proceeded apace in the past decade. Generically referred to as quiet light, these quantum sources exhibit reduced fluctuations (noise) in comparison with classical sources such as natural light, and light from LEDs and lasers. A particularly useful quantum source of light is the entangled photon state, which may be generated by spontaneous optical parametric downconversion (SPDC). In this process, a laser beam illuminates an anisotropic nonlinear crystal oriented at the proper angle. A photon from the pump laser (the "mother photon") is split into a pair of twins (the "daughter photons"). The energy and momentum of the mother are shared by the daughters, which share entanglement by virtue of the nonseparability of the quantum state that describes them. It is the mission of the Quantum Imaging Laboratory to exploit nonclassical light for the purposes of optical imaging, communications, cryptography, teleportation, and computing.