3 December 2008
The first sod has been turned on the new purpose-built Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN), which will be developed next to Monash University's Clayton campus.
The MCN is the Victorian node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF), an organisation which aims to boost Australia's presence in the rapidly growing nano and bio-nanotechnological markets.
Located on the corner of Wellington and Blackburn Roads, the facility will provide Australia's leading scientists and engineers, including those from Monash, with the tools to build miniature devices that could potentially revolutionise the health care and environmental maintenance sectors.
State-of-the-art instrumentation for nano and micro scale fabrication -- that is, for fabrication at the scale of 1/100,000 and 1/10,000 of a human hair -- in purpose-built laboratories will allow researchers to develop more effective devices such as those for drug delivery, diagnostics and water sensing.
The MCN is a collaborative initiative between the Victorian and Federal Government, CSIRO, Monash University, Deakin University, La Trobe University, Swinburne University, the University of Melbourne and RMIT. Monash is the lead agency for the project.
MCN Interim Director Dr Abid Khan said the MCN would cement Victoria as a centre of excellence in nanotechnology.
"The facility will be open to national and international research and industry users who will be able to collaborate with other scientific disciplines and institutions such as Monash," Dr Khan said.
"The MCN will also act as a training ground for the next generation of researchers wanting to study advanced micro/nano manufacturing."
As part of the project, each MCN participant partner has agreed to make their own key nano-related facilities available to researchers.
Construction is expected to start in January 2009. The facility is expected to be completed by the end of 2009.
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