Nanotech Grant For Cornell Researcher - News Item

Farhan Rana, leader of a research group in the electrical and computer engineering department at Cornell University, has received a $400000 grant as part of the National Science Foundation's CAREER awards program. The $400,000 is only a small part of $2.7 million in grants spread among New York state nanotechnology researchers.

Rana’s work looks at the manipulation of atoms to create semiconductor lasers for medicine, fibre optics and imaging.

The medical lasers he is working on currently exist but are around "two or three dinner tables" in size and cost approximately $250000. Rana’s work has the aim of producing the same type of lasers but scale them down to be about the size of a few grains of sand and reduce the cost to around $1000.

Posted 13^th February 2004