The Clark School has entered into a multi-million-dollar agreement with the Petroleum Institute of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to establish an Education and Energy Research Center. Energy research is the primary focus of this effort, involving several faculty members. A secondary emphasis is education, providing "point-of-contact" services and orientation for 60 institute scholars who will study at top U.S. universities. In the first phase of a long-term agreement, the center will be funded with $4 million over two years.

A team of faculty and staff in the Clark School's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (led by Ali Haghani, professor and chair) was one of the winners in the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) competition. RITA seeks to establish and maintain ten Tier I University Transportation Centers, providing up to $1 million per center per year in 2007, 2008, and 2009 (to be matched from non-federal sources in an amount at least equal to the US DOT grant amount). Collaborators in this multidisciplinary center include various Clark School departments, the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the School of Public Policy.

The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation will give more than $1 million over four years to the Clark School for biological research at the nanoscale. Researchers from the Clark School and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute will develop a new "biochip" technology that promises to give doctors a new way to discover drugs to treat bacterial infections without stimulating resistance-building mutations. Successful application could have widespread implications for preventing infections and testing drugs for a range of health problems. The Clark School's Professor William Bentley (bioengineering/Maryland NanoCenter) at left, Professor Reza Ghodssi (electrical and computer engineering [ECE]/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]/Maryland NanoCenter) and Professor Gary Rubloff (Maryland NanoCenter/materials science and engineering [MSE]/ISR) are involved in this research.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made a $1.5 million competitively awarded grant to the Maryland NanoCenter toward a new cooperative program to develop measurement technologies and other tools that support the creation of new nanotechnologies. The grant, which is renewable for up to five years, will support the work of 13 research scientists and engineers in the NanoCenter and NIST's new Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. A portion of the grant will be used for national outreach and education efforts directed towards young faculty members and post-doctoral researchers.

Professor Shihab Shamma (ECE/ISR), at left, is the principal investigator (PI) for a new five-year, $1.57 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant, "Neural Correlates of Streaming of Complex Sounds," is sponsored by NIH's National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders. Co-PIs are ISR-affiliated Assistant Professor Jonathan Simon (ECE/Biology) and Jonathan Fritz, an assistant research scientist at ISR.

MSE Professor Robert M. Briber and coworkers have been named subcontractors on a five-year, $14 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to CalTech entitled "IMR-MIP DANSE—Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments." Clark School researchers will develop software and modeling for the analysis of neutron reflectivity data. Neutron reflectivity is a powerful technique for measuring the structure of thin films with sub-nanometer resolution in the direction of the film thickness. The Clark School team will receive $1.3 million of the total grant.

Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE/CS/University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies [UMIACS]), left, and Professor Shuvra Bhattacharyya (ECE/UMIACS), right, are part of a research team that received a National Science Foundation grant of $1.65 million for the development of a smart camera system. The two researchers, along with PI Wayne Wolf, professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University, are developing distributed smart camera systems that cooperate in real time to analyze activities in a scene, such as movements of people, vehicles and other objects. These smart camera systems can be used in airports, train terminals and other public locations to monitor and analyze the actions of individuals and large groups of people.

An IBM research team that includes representatives from the Clark School won the International Technology Alliance (ITA) contract with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MoD). The ITA is a new bilateral, cooperative technology concept created by the MoD and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, which will bring together a consortium comprised of industry and academia on both sides of the Atlantic. ECE Professor Virgil Gligor (left) is PI for the University of Maryland project, with Professor James Hendler (Computer Science/ISR/UMIACS/ECE) as co-PI. The University of Maryland team's role will be in the areas of "Security in Systems of Systems" and in "Distributed Coalition Planning and Decision Making"—areas in which the University of Maryland has been a leader for decades. The group will receive $3.5 million over the lifetime of the contract, which will last approximately 10 years.