Centers and Institutes
Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing
The UVA Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing supports collaborative research focused on developing innovative regenerative materials for use in advanced biomanufacturing, rapid proto-typing platforms amenable to scale-up, and integration and patterning for construction of hierarchical tissue systems. The center brings together UVA's technical expertise in advanced manufacturing, biomaterials synthesis, biomechanics, mechanobiology, multiscale modeling, imaging, orthopedic clinical translation, and rehabilitation. A central application focus is the improved treatment of the otherwise irrecoverable muscle injuries that result from trauma or congenital defects (e.g., cleft lip/palate) and acquired conditions (e.g. muscle tissue loss due to tumor excision or infection).
Co-Directors:
George Christ, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Orthopaedic Surgery, Mary Muilenburg Stamp Professor of Orthopaedic Research, Director of Basic and Translational Research in Orthopaedic Surgery and Head, Laboratory of Regenerative Therapeutics
Shayn Peirce-Cottler, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Plastic Surgery, Professor of Ophthalmology and UVA School of Medicine Pinn Scholar
E-mail Professor Peirce-Cottler
Center for Applied Biomechanics
As the largest university-based injury biomechanics laboratory in the world, the center specializes in impact biomechanics for injury prevention. Started by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1989, the center now operates out of a 30,000-square-foot facility located in the University of Virginia's North Fork discovery park. The center is recognized as one of the world’s leading research groups in the field, using state-of-the-art equipment to analyze the intricacies of how the human body responds to injury. The center is where crash survival becomes a science.
Director: Jason R. Kerrigan, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Center for Automata Processing
The University of Virginia and Micron Technology, Inc., co-founded the Center for Automata Processing (CAP) to catalyze the growth of an ecosystem around automata processing. Micron’s Automata Processor, a hardware implementation of automata computing, is poised to dramatically accelerate solutions aimed at big data challenges. The center is a collaboration of universities, companies and government agencies. The center’s objectives are to develop innovative technologies and applications that address industry, government and societal needs, and to train future data scientists and engineers in this groundbreaking approach to computing.
Director: Kevin Skadron, Harry Douglas Forsyth Professor and Department Chair, Computer Science
Associate Director: Mircea R. Stan, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Center for Electrochemical Science and Engineering
This center addresses a technologically critical field. It encompasses the broad field of electrochemical science and engineering, which affects the performance and reliability of most products manufactured in the world today. The center is a multi-disciplinary research effort that includes activities in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering, as well as interactions with Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics. It is one of the nation's leading research centers of its kind.
Co-Directors:
Robert G. Kelly, AT&T Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
John R. Scully, Charles Henderson Chaired Professor and Interim Chair, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory
UVA Engineering leads the $29.7 million, 10-university Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory (CRISP) as part of the Semiconductor Research Corporation's Joint University Microelectronics Program. CRISP researchers are working to unlock the power of big data to solve some of society's biggest challenges by removing the computing "memory wall," which refers to the separation between computer memory that stores data and the processors that operate on the data. Computer systems are increasingly bottlenecked by data movement costs and are no longer able to keep up with the “big data” explosion. This trend is compounded by the fact that data in memory is stored without any consideration of data content, usage patterns, or how data are grouped into higher-level objects. Solving these challenges and enabling the next generation of data-intensive applications requires computing to be embedded in and around the data, creating intelligent memory and storage architectures that do as much of the computing as possible as close to the bits as possible.
Director: Kevin Skadron, Harry Douglas Forsyth Professor and Chair of Computer Science
Collaborators:
Mircea R. Stan, Virginia Microelectronics Consortium Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Samira Khan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems
The UVA Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems (Center), internationally recognized for its research on risk, resilience, and reliability, brings together UVA's technical expertise in collaborations across the University. The Center develops theory, methodology, and technology to identify and manage risk for engineering systems. Industry and government sponsors of research contribute their unique strengths to a broad range of ongoing Center projects including, reliability modeling and simulation of multiple failure modes in complex and embedded systems, including hardware and software performance reliability, resilience analytics, and critical cyber physical defense and civil infrastructure systems.
Director: James H. Lambert, P.E., F. IEEE, F.ASCE, F.SRA, D.WRE, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment
Center for Transportation Studies
Since its establishment following the federal Surface Transportation Act of 1987, the UVA Center for Transportation Studies has become one of the foremost university sites for research dealing with information technology, highway safety, transportation planning, management, and policy.
The center oversees a comprehensive transportation program that includes education, research, and professional training. Thanks to longstanding ties with such organizations as the Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research, the Mid-Atlantic Universities Transportation Center and the Federal Highway Administration, the center offers a comprehensive research program, covering areas such as intelligent transportation systems, transportation planning and logistics, traffic simulation, highway safety, sustainable transportation, infrastructure management, and freight and traffic operations. In the area of professional training, the center’s initiatives include the UVA Transportation Training Academy and the Transportation Project Management Institute.
Director: Devin Harris, Associate Professor, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment
Center for Visual and Decision Informatics
This is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. The center’s mission is to research and develop next-generation technologies in data science, big data analytics, including visual analytics, augmented intelligence, and decision informatics to enable decision makers in government and industry to fundamentally improve the way their organization’s information is interpreted and analyzed. Its goals are to: become a world leader in big data and data science; create a network of diverse and complementary research sites in the United States and abroad; accelerate the creation and transfer of technology to industry and commercial products; attract high-quality student talent; and produce a future workforce that has the potential to benefit local and global economy.
UVA Site Director: Peter A. Beling, Professor, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment
Commonwealth Center for Advanced Logistics Systems (CCALS)
CCALS is a consortium of industry, government and universities that adapts and transforms advanced logistics systems for market-ready solutions. CCALS engages and benefits its members through applied research and innovation in data analytics, cyber-physical systems, and strategic investments. The University of Virginia and other university members of CCALS bring outstanding capabilities and research depth in logistics-related disciplines. They also provide access to the best and brightest engineering, business and IT students who will compose tomorrow’s logistics workforce. Industry sets the agenda at CCALS, leveraging university expertise and real-world experience to solve logistics challenges that arise as complex technological, mechanical and human systems interact. With multiple perspectives at the table and favorable intellectual property policies, CCALS ensures that promising discoveries become effective business solutions faster than ever.
Contact: Thomas Polmateer, Logistics Research Systems Analyst, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment
Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM)
CCAM is a public-private research partnership created by the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia State University, Canon, Chromalloy, Newport News Shipbuilding, Rolls-Royce, Sandvik Coromant, Siemens, and Sulzer Metco. The center’s overall goal is to accelerate new technologies from initial creation through application and proof of concept and into commercial practice by bringing researchers from the universities and industry into a shared collaborative environment. CCAM is housed in a 60,000 square-foot research facility near Richmond, Va., providing researchers access to production quality, state-of-the-art advanced manufacturing equipment for proof-of-concept experiments for new research results. CCAM provides research and internship opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students.
UVA Advanced Manufacturing Fellow: Richard Martukanitz, Research Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Environmental Resilience Institute
The pace and dimensions of environmental change are now greater than in any other period in human history. Climate and land-use change, population growth, and urbanization are putting people, infrastructure, and environments at risk and affecting critical resources such as water, food, and energy. Disruptions − natural and human-caused − have now become the new norm. The Enviromental Resilience Institute brings together UVA faculty, students, and external partners to conduct trans-disciplinary research at the intersection of environmental change and human wellbeing. The institute’s overarching goal is to identify solutions to some of society’s most challenging and complex social-environmental problems. These grand challenges are complex, often global, and thus multicultural. Solutions require a new paradigm of trans-disciplinary research that merges theories, methods, and data across human, natural, and infrastructure systems to both enhance resilience and to understand future scenarios of change.
UVA Engineering Representatives:
Andres F. Clarens, Associate Professor, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment
Jonathan L. Goodall, Professor, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment
Global Infectious Diseases Institute
UVA’s Global Infectious Diseases Institute aims to address three major 21st-century concerns: diarrheal disease in children, pandemic threats and the most resistant and urgent infectious organisms known as superbugs. The institute takes an interdisciplinary approach, from the identification and diagnosis of disease to intervention to evaluation, in order to understand the mechanisms of disease and intervene medically, socially and through policy. The institute will involve faculty and students from the UVA schools for engineering, medicine, arts and sciences, public policy, education, nursing, business and law.
UVA Engineering Representatives:
Roseanne M. Ford, Professor of Chemical Engineering
Jason Papin, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
nanoSTAR Institute
The nanoSTAR Institute encourages, facilitates, and supports collaborative research, education, and commercialization in the key areas of electronics, biomedicine, and energy and the environment through partnerships with academia, industry, and national laboratories. Nanoscale research at UVA encompasses three broad theme areas: electronics, biomedicine, and energy & the environment, and The University has several core facilities that support the research community.
NSF I/UCRC Center for Laser & Plasma For Advanced Manufacturing (LAM)
The mission of the center is to develop a science, engineering and technology base for laser and plasma processing of materials, devices and systems for advanced manufacturing. LAM provides a unique environment for industry partners to stay abreast of the latest developments in advanced manufacturing technologies and access an outstanding team of scientists with top class facilities for research projects while offering excellent networking opportunities with key government personnel, industry peers, and potential future employees.
Director: Mool C. Gupta, Langley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Multi-Functional Integrated System Technology (MIST) Center
This is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. The center’s mission is to facilitate integration of novel materials, processes, devices and circuits into multi-functional systems through research partnerships between university, industry and government stakeholders. While there is a lot of effort in Internet of Things (IoT) applications at the software level, the focus of the MIST center is to develop the hardware base for the IoT. The UVA site adds expertise in functional materials, solid-state devices, photonics, Terahertz sensing, thermal characterization, multiscale modeling and heterogeneous integration.
UVA Site Director: Avik Ghosh, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
NSF Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST)
The Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST) is a National Science Foundation sponsored Nanosystems Engineering Research Center (NERC). ASSIST develops and employs nanotechnology enabled energy harvesting and storage, ultra-low power electronics, and sensors to create innovative, battery-free, body-powered, and wearable health monitoring systems. The center’s mission is to use nanotechnology to improve global health by enabling a correlation between personal health and personal environment, empowering individuals and doctors to manage wellness and improve quality of life. The center received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2012 for five years of research, renewable out to 2022. The University of Virginia is one of the university partners.
Campus Partner Director: Benton Calhoun, Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Rolls-Royce University Technology Center
The University of Virginia is one of only three universities in the United States chosen to join the global Rolls-Royce University Technology Centers network, comprising research groups in world-class universities identified to develop long-term research and technology programs. The centers provide mutual benefits through funding of fundamental, collaborative research to advance key aerospace technologies critical to Rolls-Royce. UVA’s center specializes in the study of advanced material systems, flow modelling and other fields. UVA works closely with Rolls-Royce to investigate ceramic matrix composite materials for use in aerospace and other high-technology markets. CMCs offer high strength at the extreme temperatures and pressures encountered in aerospace applications, but with significantly reduced weight. UVA also provides cutting-edge capability in advanced coatings, including novel compositions and application methods. Advanced coating technology is required to take full advantage of CMCs, so the center takes advantage of the synergy of both capabilities existing at the same institution. Complementary areas of research at UVA include catalytic coatings, soot emissions, aqueous corrosion and manufacturing technology development.
Director: Elizabeth J. Opila, Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
Virginia Center for Grid Research
The Virginia Center for Grid Research is dedicated to performing research and solving issues surrounding the operation, deployment, and use of large distributed data and computing systems. The center’s overriding objective is to advance the science and application of grid computing so that it is more useful and readily available to those end users that can benefit from its power. Our goal is not to simply solve a few pieces of the overall grid computing puzzle, but also to promote the use of grid computing systems to improve the capabilities of other areas of science and to perform research and share information and ideas.
Director: Andrew Grimshaw, Professor of Computer Science
UVA Center for Wireless Health
Wireless Health is an emerging field that seeks to infuse wireless technologies in healthcare and medical research with the goals of improving patient care and quality of life while reducing healthcare costs. Efforts in this field are necessarily interdisciplinary, bringing together engineers with doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical researchers, caretakers, family members and patients themselves. The UVA Center for Wireless Health was established in 2009 to coordinate research efforts in this area across the University and with collaborators at other institutions. Ongoing projects include in-home sensors for identifying signs of depression, body-worn sensors for fall risk assessment, and an artificial pancreas that combines blood glucose sensing and insulin pumping for Type I diabetics.
Director: John A. Stankovic, Professor of Computer Science