UCSB center helps land $24M national center to study environmental impacts of nanotechnology

The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara (CNS-UCSB) helped to win the new University of California Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology (UC CEIN), a five-year, $24 million center co-funded by the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency to study the environmental impacts of nanotechnology. The new center, headquartered at UCLA but involving significant collaboration from UC Santa Barbara researchers, will include a research group on environmental risk perception led by Dr. Barbara Herr Harthorn, Director of the CNS-UCSB and Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, Anthropology & Sociology. CNS-UCSB also will collaborate in the UC CEIN's novel science journalist program, led by Professor William Freudenburg, a professor in UCSB's Environmental Studies Program and a member of Harthorn's team. UC CEIN also includes other researchers in the Bren School of Environmental Science and

Management, Environmental Studies, Chemistry, and Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. "The new centers represent a promising step toward US development of much needed systematic knowledge about the environmental toxicology, ecology, and bioaccumulation of nanoparticles," said Harthorn. "Characterization of the hazards (and eventually, potential for exposures) associated with nanomaterial development and incorporation in other products is an essential next step in the responsible development of nanotechnologies. CNS-UCSB researchers involved in the UC CEIN and our new collaborators look forward to assessing public perceptions of nanoparticle environmental hazards, and conducting systematic comparative analyses of risk and risk communication, as we work with UC CEIN toxicologists and ecologists to develop empirically based risk communication."

UC CEIN will be led by UCLA's chief of nanomedicine, Dr. Andre Nel. It was founded due to growing public, industry, and regulatory agencies' interest in better understanding the environmental impacts of nanoparticles. Combining interests in understanding nanoparticles' effects in the environment, NSF and EPA sought out teams of university researchers to conduct such studies in a competition that was run over 2007 and 2008. The presence of CNS-UCSB and its experience as an NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center dedicated to research on the societal impacts of nanotechnologies contributed to the success of the UC CEIN in securing its $24 million award.