Dr. Josephine Yuen is the Ex Dir of E3S Center a collaboration of UCB, MIT, Stanford and UTEP. She is a Physical Chemist, Ph.D. from Cornell. She explains the e3s Center goals, Community College program, and focus on getting the research right.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30 ] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Dr Josephine u n. She is the executive director of the [inaudible] center, a collaboration of UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, [00:01:00 ] and the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr [inaudible] is a physical chemist by training with a phd from Cornell University and she was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory. She became a member of technical staff in bell laboratories and eventually held director level positions in product development, product management, manufacturing and supply line management. More recently, she was the CEO of try form x INC which develops and manufactures precision polymer [00:01:30 ] optics for the communications consumer products and medical industries. After spending 30 years in industry, she was a program director at the National Science Foundation. Today she talks with me about the [inaudible] center here at Berkeley, Josephine Ewen. Welcome to spectrum. 

Speaker 1:        Thank you.

Speaker 3:        What is the origin story of e three s? How did it all get started? 

Speaker 1:        Well, let's first understand what e three s stands for. It's [00:02:00 ] an acronym and this acronym for a center does headquarted in UC Berkeley and it's the center for energy efficient electronics science. Our story really began at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has several programs that fund centers intended to bring researchers from many institutions together to solve difficult problems [00:02:30 ] and one of those programs is the science and Technology Center program. Way Back and I believe most probably was 2008 there was a solicitation asking technical community and that is universities. Did you submit proposals for a new science and technology center? This type of solicitation comes out once every three years or so and so in two and nine professor [00:03:00 ] [inaudible] off the east department submitted a proposal that brings together researchers from various institutions, namely UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford to propose a new center, a new center that will do research necessary to come up with an alternative to the current day trend system. 

Speaker 1:        No, you may want to ask, why do we need that? After all, transistors are everywhere and [00:03:30 ] it's in every aspects of our life. The reason we need an alternative is that we need an nutrient system or any kind of electronic components that would draw significantly less energy. Pol consumption in electronic devices have been dropping by virtue of the fact that through miniature isolation, the electronic industry has made great gains, not only in power consumption but in the cost of the device, [00:04:00 ] but unfortunately, miniaturization has hit a brick wall. It no longer is delivering the benefits it has delivered 10 plus years ago and you can see it by the very fact that the operating voltage of those devices in the past 10 plus years ago when the line was shrinks, you can see a big drop in the operating voltage, but in the last 10 years it's more or less flattened out and [00:04:30 ] even though the line was has shrunk further, we see that the operating voltage is around a vote, maybe slightly less than a vote now in the state of the art devices, but really we want to get to a device that can operate in the millivolt range and that is what the centers set out to do and we're doing the research necessary to get there. [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        I wanted to have [00:05:00 ] you talk about the themes of research at e three s and what made choosing themes and appealing method for your organization? 

Speaker 1:        The center is researching different scientific concepts to achieve different device approaches. No one knows what is the best approach at this point. The current c Moss transistor is ubiquitous. There's no reason to believe is replacing will be [00:05:30 ] equally ubiquitous. The replacement may be a different solution for different application. That's why our research portfolio includes four themes. Not all four themes address the transistor. If you think of a integrated circuit, it's really a network of switches and the wires that connect us, which is three of the themes, address a different [00:06:00 ] type of switch while one theme address, how do you have more efficient wires or lower power consumption wires? Today's wars are copper wires, metal to wires, but we are doing research to have the communication between switches being done optically 

Speaker 3:        and just for the record, what are the four themes? 

Speaker 1:        The first theme is Nano Electronics. [00:06:30 ] The second theme is Nano mechanics. The third theme is nanophotonics and the fourth theme is Nano magnetics and you can see the first, second and fourth addresses. How do you get a different type of switch? While the third theme addresses the interconnection, namely the use of light for the interconnection amongst the switches [00:07:00 ] that we also call optical interconnect. 

Speaker 3:        How interdisciplinary is the center? Do you have a sense of that in terms of the investigators and the researchers? 

Speaker 1:        The center is highly into disciplinary disciplines involved. Our electrical engineering, chemistry material science and Physics 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:07:30 ] you are listening to spectrum of public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley public. Our guest is Josephine n. She is the executive director of the three s center. In the next segment she details the e three s community college outreach group. [inaudible]. An [00:08:00 ] interesting part of the e three s center is the program you've developed with community colleges. Do you want to explain how that program began and what its goals are? 

Speaker 1:        A science and technology center is expected to educate besides do research and the education is not only have graduate students, so in I'll propose which NSF we decided to focus [00:08:30 ] on community college students. The reason we decided to do that is because in California we have the largest community college system in the country and many women and underrepresented minority start their post high school education. In community colleges. Our needs to increase its output of workers in this fuse [00:09:00 ] state utilizes science and technology disciplines and in order to do that we have to be able to encourage and groom participants from populations that are typically underrepresented in the technical world and this really based on that consideration that we say less focus on encouraging students, helping students from community colleges [00:09:30 ] develop a career in science and engineering. 

Speaker 3:        What can you tell me about how the program is working and how people participate in it? From the community college side, 

Speaker 1:        we have a program on campus called the transfer to excellence and this program while started by the East Rehab Center has now expanded to include other centers. This has been made possible because in addition to [00:10:00 ] the east area centers grind, the National Science Foundation also gave us an additional three years grant to expand the community college program and that has allowed the program to place students not only in the [inaudible] center but also to other centers on campus. Namely coins, the deals with Nana mechanics and also [inaudible] that deals with [00:10:30 ] synthetic bio fuse. The students from community college come on campus in the summer for nine weeks to do research, the first weakest bootcamp with the learn some of the basics to prepare them to go into the labs and then for the other eight weeks they work in the lab on individual projects and at the end, in the last week of the internship, they have to [00:11:00 ] present their work both in terms of giving talks and also in the form of posters in a poster session and that typically takes place at the beginning of August. And how large is that program? Last summer we hosted approximately 15 students. 

Speaker 3:        Does that sort of what your target is for each summer? 

Speaker 1:        Yes. Between 12 to 15 is off target [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        And how do people [00:11:30 ] in community colleges get involved in it? How do they get selected or how do they apply? 

Speaker 1:        In the fall we go through what we consider our recruitment face. We Post the information about the program on the website of our center. The staff of the center also goes out on campus to recruit. We host workshops to share information about a program an