Paul Wright, speaking at the event, is director of the four-campus program and the Banatao Institute @CITRIS Berkeley.
PHOTO BY WWW.BAYAREAEVENTPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

More than 600 well-wishers turned out for the February 27 opening of CITRIS headquarters—now called Sutardja Dai Hall—new home of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and its state-of-the-art Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory. Festivities included distinguished speakers, Cal’s marching band and a communal ribbon cutting, followed by research demonstrations, guided tours and festive receptions scattered throughout the hall.

“In these walls, brilliant, well-trained minds will take a delicate prototype and then, with robust engineering, create a more vital proven concept,” said director Paul Wright, explaining how CITRIS research will generate new startups, new jobs and entire new industries. Also speaking was former California governor Gray Davis, who championed the center as one of his four Institutes for Science and Innovation to expand UC’s role in forging high-tech innovations to boost the state’s economy.

CITRIS unites a network of researchers and students from UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz to generate new information technologies that can address pressing challenges in energy, health care and the environment, among others. Multidisciplinary teams are the hallmark of CITRIS—uniting engineers with experts in business, economics, law, public policy and industry from the outset when identifying a research problem. Projects on display included a smart, programmable thermostat and Mobile Millennium, a network of GPS-equipped cell phones that provide real-time traffic flow data.

Manager Bill Flounders gave guided tours of the 15,000-square-foot Marvell Nanofabrication Lab, the jewel of the new CITRIS headquarters, outfitted with some of the world’s most sophisticated semiconductor fabrication equipment to support research in computer chip production.
PHOTO BY AARON WALBURG

Naming of the building and lab recognize major support from Sehat Sutardja (Ph.D.’88 EECS) and his wife, Weili Dai (B.A.’84 CS), and brother, Pantas Sutardja (B.S.’83, M.S.’85, Ph.D.’88 EECS), cofounders of Sunnyvale-based Marvell Semiconductor. The Berkeley component of the program, the Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley, is named for supporters Dado and Maria Banatao, who also helped establish the Banatao GLOBE program, Global Learning and Outreach from Berkeley Engineering.

Go to www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/02/27_citris.shtml.