It's clear that Rice has recruited a visionary president who will guide this Houston-based university to nanotechnology leadership in the coming decades. Expect to see Rice equal or excel Harvard, MIT, U. Tokyo, and Stanford in the race to nanotechnology. Foresight salutes this first U.S. university to actively pursue nanotechnology development as a primary mission. Within the past few years, an entirely new field has emerged, focused upon matter at the molecular and atomic scale. From nanoscience will come nanotechnology, the ability to engineer matter on a nanometer scale for useful purposes.
Nanotechnology is truly interdisciplinary in approach.
It is the outgrowth of a synthesis of physics, chemistry, microelectronics, materials science, and biology. Already, one-fourth of Rice's faculty in science and engineering is involved to some degree in research related to nanotechnology. Indeed, it was in one of Rice's very successful interdisciplinary programs, the Rice Quantum Institute, that buckminsterfullerene, one of the marvels of nanoscience, was first identified. Rice's efforts in nanotechnology are responsive not only to the revolution in electronic and information technology but to the ongoing biomedical revolution as well. Successful nanotechnology will enable computers to keep shrinking in size and cost.