Research Centers

The Center for Precision Metrology is focused on precision engineering and measurement including: research in manufacturing processes and quality assurance for mechanical parts to within a millionth of a meter. New state-of-the-art facilities will include clean rooms and multiple metrology labs. The Center's efforts—which have included high speed machine parts, specialized sensors, aerospace industry applications—have attracted companies such as Caterpillar, Mitutoyo and Boeing for collaboration. The center also includes a group focused on motorsports and automotive research with collaborative partnerships with area race teams and NASCAR. The Center has been recognized as a National Science Foundation Center of Excellence in New Industry Collaboration and in Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

The Center for Optoelectronics and Optical Communications includes research areas in: design and fabrication of photonic devices, integrated optical circuitry, assembly and packaging of optical systems, optical materials, methods for precision optical metrology, and optical imaging and inverse methods for wavefront synthesis. The center has successfully allied with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, The Carolinas MicroOptics Triangle, and the North Carolina Photonics Consortium. A respected leader in the discipline, the center has won Defense Advancement Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grants for the past three years.

The Center for eBusiness Technology is currently focused on the financial industry. The center is partnering with Bank of America and Wachovia to solve industry issues pertaining to technology applications. These applications include information privacy and security, intelligent data analysis, systems integration, information visualization. The Center is expanding into research in Bioinformatics and Homeland Security. It has the distinction of being a "National Security Agency Center for Information Assurance Education." The Center for eBusiness Technology receives research funding from federal, corporate, and private grants.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has recently established a Bioinformatics Program. This is a joint effort by scientists within the Departments of Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, and Mathematics , and in the Research Division of the Carolinas Healthcare Center. The focus of the program is on genetic factors in disease and gene regulation, although we define Bioinformatics more generally as the discovery, development and application of powerful computational tools to extract knowledge from complex biological data. Currently, our faculty work on a variety of projects including genetic factors in ovarian and hepatic cancer, new approaches to the analysis of microarray data, and the use of systems analysis techniques to understand gene-gene interactions. The Bioinformatics Program will be located in a $35M, 70,000 sf Bioinformatics Building under construction on the Charlotte Research Institute Campus of UNC-Charlotte.