I wanted to share the following article with you from the Central New York Business Journal:

ESD awards SUNY Poly’s CATN2 grant funding for work supporting nanotechnology industry

by Eric Reinhardt

ALBANY, N.Y. — A state program has awarded the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Nanoelectronics and Nanomaterials (CATN2) a grant of $9.2 million over 10 years to continue its work supporting the nanotechnology industry.

The Empire State Development (ESD) Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) awarded the funding. CATN2 is located at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE) in Albany.

The award enables CATN2 to “continue to drive innovation, commercialization, education and outreach and provide powerful nanotechnology-centered return-on-investment to the state’s economy,” according to a SUNY Poly CNSE news release.

“The CATN2 business-development strategy aligns directly with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s public-private partnership blueprint for upstate New York that is creating the New York NanoTech corridor,” Michael Fancher, executive director of the New York State CATN2 and associate professor of nanoeconomics, said in the SUNY Poly CNSE news release. “…The center will provide critical support to the statewide, nanotechnology-focused open innovation public-private partnership model that has successfully attracted globally recognized industry leaders and encouraged a vibrant entrepreneurial culture.”

CATN2 will use the award’s first installment of $921,000 to support SUNY Poly’s infrastructure that includes shared-use labs and multi-user facilities to attract companies to New York and help those already here to “grow and expand.”

Specifically, the center will support small and large partner companies and workforce training.

SUNY Poly will also use the funding for its workforce-development initiatives. It will also play a role in the “attraction, retention, and startup” of companies that are part of the “innovation” clusters that SUNY Poly operates.

Specifically, CATN2 will focus on supporting entrepreneurial startup companies, including access to business-assistance services and a “highly skilled” workforce.

Empire State Development’s division of science, technology, and innovation (NYSTAR) is funding the $9.2 million award. Through the division’s CAT program, NYSTAR supports “university-industry collaborative research and technology transfer in commercial relevant technologies.”

The state created the CAT program in 1983 to facilitate the transfer of technology from New York’s research universities into commercially viable products manufactured in the private sector.