Engineering professor Brady: photonics will change "what it means to be someplace" Photo: Les Todd

Building Bridges of Light

At 10:00 a.m., David Brady, director of Duke's new Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communications Systems, is giving a tour of the lab in his temporary, off-campus headquarters. Here, faculty members and graduate students in engineering have been developing a "mouse wand"--a device that will allow the user to sketch on a computer in three dimensions by simply waving the wand in the air. While this experimental equipment is still novel, it is nothing compared to the future applications of optical technology that Brady has come to Duke's Pratt School of Engineering to explore. His field is known as photonics--"the melding of light with electronics to manage and transmit information," as Kristina Johnson, dean of the Pratt School, has described it.

Photonics, which promises to bridge the gap between humans and computers by means of light rather than wires, is at a stage of development similar to the status of electronics in the 1950s, when the transistor came along, Brady says.

The mouse wand is a first step. One small step. What comes next, Brady suggests, is a giant leap. "Try to imagine a whole room that could record, analyze, and transmit everything that is happening in it, including all human activity." It may sound like the Jetsons' cartoon kitchen, but such intelligent sensing systems are one of Brady's primary research interests.

"Eventually there will be no need for people to be chained to computers," he says. "When you point and wave your arms around, the sensor or a robot (which can be in another room or another part of the planet) will follow you. We are literally changing what it means to be someplace. Eventually, by means of this technology, you can be anywhere."

On a typical day, Brady, who is the Addy Family Professor of electrical and computer engineering, as well as Fitzpatrick Center director, will meet with engineering students and colleagues while also keeping an eye via webcam on the construction of the Pratt School's new 322,000-square-foot Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine, and Applied Sciences (CIEMAS). CIEMAS is a $97-million project that represents a profound leap forward for engineering at Duke. The building--located in the middle of what was once Science Drive, at the nexus of the Medical Center, the Divinity School, Perkins Library, and the new Genomics Research complex, just up the hill--serves as a dramatic metaphor for Duke's interdisciplinary approach to engineering and applied sciences. The Fitzpatrick Center will occupy 120,000 square feet of the CIEMAS complex and will include labs and offices. Established with a gift of $25 million from Michael Fitzpatrick '70 and Patty Fitzpatrick '69, the Fitzpatrick Center is aiming to advance photonics as an information science, which, according to one industry analyst, has potential sales in opto-electronic equipment alone of some $34 billion by 2006.

"Just yesterday I visited professor Allan Johnson in radiology," Brady says. "We talked about what we are doing in this lab and kicked some ideas around. Professor Johnson is interested in adding optical probes to the suite of technologies that radiology uses to probe structure from molecular to macroscopic scales. We discussed how Fitzpatrick Center capabilities might be integrated in his efforts."

In the nascent field known as biophotonics, where light waves are used to collect and deliver information for medical purposes, there are already real-time, three-dimensional imaging technologies in development that, potentially, will be able to detect specific molecules in a given tissue. Such "microstructural" imaging, Brady says, may help physicians understand and recognize something as complex as the way a gene's coded information operates in a single human cell. Other noninvasive, optically based chemical sensors will be able to measure oxygen density in the blood, monitor glucose, and even detect cancer--all without harming or invading the tissue being examined.

"The integration of engineering and medicine is a natural here at Duke," Brady says, and with that, the lab tour is over. He heads downstairs to check in with colleagues.