The 91探花 School of Nursing today announced a $10 million bequest from 91探花chemistry professor emeritus Larry R. Dalton and his wife, Nicole A. Boand.

The gift, the largest in the history of the School of Nursing, will increase access to nursing education, with $8 million dedicated to cost-of-attendance scholarships. The remaining $2 million will be used to enrich and expand clinical education, including the recruitment of clinical nurse educators who can provide practical, on-the-job training for students.

Both programs will be named in honor of Boand, a registered nurse who completed her training with the Los Angeles County School of Nursing at Los Angeles County General Hospital, where she worked in the adolescent crisis psychiatric ward.

Bequests allow donors to direct their assets to causes they believe in after their death. To Boand, the anticipation of providing a way to bring more students into the nursing profession is meaningful.

鈥淭his gift is what makes the end of my life worthwhile,鈥� she said.

Nurses are in high demand nationwide, but especially in Washington, which is projected to have the greatest need for nurses of all 50 U.S. states by 2035, according to a from the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis. Meeting that demand requires long-term planning and future-looking philanthropy, such as the Boand-Dalton bequest.

Allison Webel, interim executive dean of the School of Nursing, said the bequest will help further diversify the student population, while practical training puts UW鈥檚 graduates at an advantage when they enter the workforce.

鈥淚 cannot emphasize enough the impact this bequest will have. It will truly open doors for diverse, innovative students who may not have previously seen a nursing career as a possibility, and uniquely prepare them to meet the needs of Washington鈥檚 patient population. With this support, our students will enter the nursing workforce with a distinct advantage at a time when our communities need them most,鈥� Webel said.

The shortage of nurses in Washington is compounded by the national health care crisis, which was exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, Boand said. Many hospitals and other care providers are now forced to rely on so-called 鈥渢raveling鈥� or agency nurses who are paid at higher rates in exchange for temporary assignments, often bouncing from city to city, Boand said.

鈥淭he intention of our gift is to support the extended development of training in a clinical setting matching the student鈥檚 choice of specialization, including providing appropriate training supervision,鈥� Boand said. 鈥淭his would provide the nursing student with deepened clinical experience in their area of preference, so they enter their nursing career fully prepared to provide the best care for their patients.鈥�

That training can help send nurses to fill vacancies in rural and underserved communities, where there is high demand. And Boand said she鈥檚 hopeful the gift鈥檚 impacts will replicate for 91探花students what she experienced training and working in Los Angeles.

鈥淚 really would love to see the camaraderie return to nursing,鈥� Boand said. 鈥淎nd the sense that as nurses, we鈥檙e valuable to the patients as their advocates and caretakers.鈥�

Nurses, who for decades , serve a vital role in health care delivery, speaking up for patients while providing skilled care. Nurses serve as a bridge between physicians and patients, Boand said. But nursing education programs lack much of the federal funding that is available for medical students.

While no one can predict future costs, the Boand-Dalton gift is expected to increase scholarships above current levels for nearly 100% of eligible students. Additionally, the gifts will help pay for faculty to focus on clinical supervision, providing students with relevant practical experience.

Dalton, who joined the 91探花faculty in 1998 as the George B. Kauffman Professor in Chemistry, said institutions like the 91探花play a key role in training generations of workers, especially in critical fields that support human health and well-being such as nursing.

And the COVID pandemic laid bare the need for nurses, Dalton said.

鈥淭here is no greater societal need at this time than the need for increased financial support for the training of nurses,鈥� he said.

The School of Nursing, which ranks among the top nursing programs in the world, brings together science, technology, skills and a commitment to care for all. The Boand bequests serve the school鈥檚 mission to enable graduates to improve the health of all people by using innovative and evidence-based solutions.

91探花President Ana Mari Cauce thanked Boand and Dalton for the tremendous impact the couple has had across the University.

鈥淟arry and Nicole鈥檚 philanthropy is a beacon to others. With their previous gifts, they鈥檝e created enormous impact through named professorships, which help the 91探花retain talented faculty, and support for our chemistry department, making it one of the nation鈥檚 top programs,鈥� Cauce said. “Their investment in nursing scholarships and clinical education comes at a critical time in the post-pandemic era, and we are grateful for their visionary generosity.”

For more information, contact Alex Abplanalp, assistant dean, 91探花School of Nursing, at ann08@uw.edu.

Researchers at the 91探花, working with researchers from the ETH-Zurich, Purdue University and Virginia Commonwealth University, have achieved an optical communications breakthrough that could revolutionize information technology.

They created a tiny device, smaller than a human hair, that translates electrical bits (0s and 1s of the digital language) into light, or photonic bits, at speeds 10s of times faster than current technologies.

鈥淎s with earlier advances in information technology, this can dramatically impact the way we live,鈥� said , a 91探花chemistry professor emeritus and leader in photonics research.

These new electro-optic devices approach the size of current electronic circuit elements and are important for integrating photonics and electronics on a single chip. The new technology also involves utilization of a particle, a plasmon polariton, that has properties intermediate between electrons and photons. This hybrid particle technology is referred to as plasmonics.

The findings were published today in the journal Nature.

鈥淭he device has been built as a plasmonic modulator,鈥� said Christian Haffner, a graduate student at ETH-Zurich and lead author of the paper. 鈥淭his is unusual as the traditional implementation relies on photonics rather than plasmonics. As a matter of fact, researchers avoid plasmonics, as plasmonics is known in all industry as a technology that comes at the price of highest optical losses. Yet 鈥� and this is by far the most spectacular finding 鈥� a trick has been found to use plasmonics without suffering from such high losses.鈥�

To increase the information-handling capacity of computing, telecommunications, sensing and control technologies, data needs to be communicated with high bandwidth over vast distances without signals (information) degrading, or consuming too much energy and generating too much heat. That鈥檚 where the new technology described in the Nature article fits in. Called an electro-optic modulator, the device converts electrical signals into optical ones capable at traveling either over fiberglass optic cabling or wirelessly through space via satellite and cell towers. This must be accomplished with excellent energy efficiency using extremely small devices capable of processing massive amounts of data.

鈥淭he device must be very sensitive, capable of responding to very small electrical fields. If the fields needed to control the device are small, then the power consumption is low as well. This is important as energy efficiency is critical to all applications,鈥� co-author Dalton said, adding, 鈥淵ou want to avoid generating heat and information degradation in computing or telecommunication applications.鈥�

This latest advance follows on a in 2000 when Dalton and a team of 91探花and University of Southern California researchers first introduced newly designed electro-optical polymers or plastics, which were integrated into centimeter-long devices that could be operated with less than a volt and with bandwidths exceeding 100 gigahertz. Unfortunately, these devices were much larger than electronic data-generating elements and were not suited for integration of electronics and photonics elements on a single chip.

However, transitioning to plasmonics, this footprint issue has now been solved.聽 And it all started when an international team of scientists and engineers set out to improve the device by integrating better organic electro-optic materials with plasmonics. Plasmons are created when light impinges onto a metallic surface, such as gold. Photons then pass on part of their energy to the electrons on the metallic surface such that the electrons oscillate. These new photon-electron oscillations are called plasmon polaritons. Working with plasmon polaritons permits dramatic reduction in the size of optical circuitry and bandwidth operation many times that of photonics. Compared to the 2000 discovery, the bandwidth of the devices increased by almost a factor of 10 while reducing the energy requirements by almost 1,000 and this translates into a reduction in heating.

The Achilles鈥� heel of plasmonics, however, is referred to as optical loss. While signal degradation with distance of transmission is not as bad as with electronics, signal degradation with plasmonics is much worse than with photonics.

鈥淭he ETH and Purdue researchers conceived of an elegant device architecture that addresses the problem of plasmonic loss and achieves loss comparable to that of all-photonic modulators by using a combination of plasmonics and photonics,鈥� Dalton said.

He called the device an elegant integration of electronics, photonics and plasmonics, using an organic electro-optic material that permits integration of all of the signal processing options.

鈥淭his is a doubly significant advance in plasmonics and organic electroactive materials, made possible through creative iteration between materials prediction, design, synthesis, and property optimization,鈥� said Linda S. Sapochak, division director for materials research at the , which helped fund the research.

The integration of electronics and photonics on chips has been recognized for more than a decade as a critical next step in the evolution of information technology. Information technology is the science of how we sense our world and both process and communicate that information.

The applications of the new device can be divided into two categories based on the wavelength of light utilized: Fiber optics telecommunications and optical interconnects in computing utilize light (photons) at optical frequencies (infrared light), while applications such as radar and wireless telecommunications use electromagnetic radiation in the radiofrequency and microwave (long wavelength light) regions.

In the telecommunications and computing space, electro-optics takes information generated in an electronic device (for example, a computer processor) and transform it into light signals that travel over a fiber optic cable or via a wireless transmission to another electronic device.

鈥淚n that sense, you might think of electro-optics as the 鈥榦n-ramps of the information superhighway,鈥欌�� said Dalton.

Electro-optics also is critical to many other applications such as radar and GPS. It represents critical sensor technology, including applications such as embedded network sensing.聽For example, electro-optics is critical to many components of an autonomous vehicle and for monitoring infrastructure elements such as buildings and bridges. The device is relevant to both digital and analog information processing.

Co-authors include Daniel Chelladurai, Yuriy Fedoryshyn, Arne Josten, Benedikt Baeuerle, Wolfgang Heni, Tatsuhiko Watanabe, Tong Cui, Bojun Cheng and Juerg Leuthold of ETH Zurich Institute of Electromagnetic Fields; Delwin L. Elder of the 91探花Department of Chemistry; Soham Saha, Alexandra Boltasseva and Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue University and Brick Nanotechnology Center; and Nathaniel Kinsey, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Funding for this project is from EU Project PLASMOFAB (688166), the ERC grant PLASILOR (640478), the National Science Foundation (DMR-1303080) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research grants (FA9550-15-1-0319 and FA9550-14-1-0138). Co-author Kinsey acknowledges support from the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium and the Virginia Commonwealth University Presidential Research Quest Fund.

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Contact Larry Dalton at dalton@chem.washington.edu.

One of only a handful of similarly funded fellowships at public universities across the United States, this fellowship will support researchers in the postdoctoral phase of their training. This is a formative and productive time for early-career scientists as they work to obtain research experience and publications to qualify them for full-time, tenure-track faculty positions. These promising scientists often play a critical role in accelerating fundamental research into real-world applications, as they are able to focus 100 percent on the research challenges before them.

“This postdoctoral fellowship will enable the Department of Chemistry to attract and support the brightest early-career scientists from across the nation, ensuring that the 91探花is a leader in next-generation research in the chemical sciences,” said , professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry. “This gift will help to elevate our department to the level of top chemistry departments around the world.”

Building on past gifts to the department, this gift will also fund two endowed chairs to help the department recruit and retain top researchers. One chair will be named for Boand’s parents and the other named for , 91探花professor emeritus of chemistry and vice provost emeritus for research. Additionally, the gift will create an endowed departmental support fund to ensure the department has flexible and reliable resources to respond to opportunities as they arise.

Dalton and Boand’s most recent investment in the Department of Chemistry serves to underscore and amplify their legacy of impact at the UW. Over the years, they have established two endowed professorships in chemistry and two endowed chairs. These endowments have provided meaningful research support to the six faculty members who have held them, and to the numerous undergraduate and graduate students working alongside those faculty.

“Larry Dalton has already made a phenomenal impact at the 91探花, and to have a faculty member add to such a legacy by demonstrating this level of dedication to his field and to future generations of students and professors in the UW’s chemistry department is truly remarkable,” 91探花President Ana Mari Cauce said. “I am profoundly thankful for this commitment from Larry and Nicole, which will honor his work and support innovation at the 91探花for years to come.”

This gift follows Dalton’s decades of research in photonics and nonlinear optics. He joined the 91探花Department of Chemistry in 1998. In 2000, Dalton and his collaborators published a foundational paper in Science, which laid the groundwork for innovations in opto-electronics, with major implications for telecommunications, sensor technology and information technology. Dalton went on to found Lumera Corp. 鈥� now part of GigPeak 鈥� to develop and manufacture opto-electronic devices. His research was instrumental in securing a major grant from the National Science Foundation to launch the Center for Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research at the UW, which was foundational for what would become the 91探花Clean Energy Institute.

During his nearly 20 years in the Department of Chemistry, Dalton invested his time, energy and resources to support students and burgeoning researchers. Both he and Boand have shown through their philanthropy a deep commitment to the next generation of science and scientists. The Dalton Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemistry, along with the newly endowed chairs and other departmental support, is a culminating expression of that commitment.

“We make this current contribution in the hope and belief that it will promote recruitment and retention of the best and brightest researchers and educators in STEM fields to the 91探花,” said Dalton. “Nicole and I appreciate the critical impact that STEM research has made and is making to the economy and well-being of Washington and the nation, and to the importance of quality education which assures continuation of this broader impact of STEM research.”

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For more information, contact James Urton with the 91探花Office of News & Information at jurton@uw.edu or 206-543-2580. To arrange an interview with Dalton or Boand, contact Candice Douglass at candiced@uw.edu, 206-616-3506 or 425-214-2704 (after hours).