The cooperation will create ten postdoctoral positions and extends the already existing cooperations with those major research institutes.

The center will operate under a “hub and spokes” model in which the research projects and activities are headquartered and coordinated from UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry. Selected research projects will also be carried out at Stanford University, UCLA, and other UC campuses.

CARA will be led by Professors Peidong Yang and Omar Yaghi, both Department of Chemistry UC Berkeley, and Dr. Kerstin Schierle-Arndt of BASF. The directors will be supported in bioscience topics by Professor Matt Francis, UC Berkeley, and Professor Klaus-Jürgen Schleifer, BASF.

Topics already identified come from the fields of inorganic materials and biosciences. Projects in chemical systems biology aim to elucidate the molecular pathways which lead to desired as well as toxicological effects of biologically active chemicals on organisms. Understanding such pathways will help to develop safer products and contribute to better assess the relevance of toxicological effects for humans.

Further research topics of the center will be about protein assemblies and structuring for e.g. the delivery of active molecules, stabilization of enzymes and optics.

Research for inorganic materials is especially interesting for the electronic industry. One of the challenges researchers face are shrinking feature sizes in electronic devices. This opens up opportunities for new materials and new manufacturing techniques.

Another opportunity for contributions of material scientists in the areas of electronics or renewable energies such as photovoltaics is the design of new very small structures. Their behavior cannot be explained only by classical physics, but new effects occur, so called quantum effects. Development of materials which make use of those effects will be one of the efforts of this center.