A $20 million gift to Cornell University from an alumnus will launch major new instructional and research initiatives in science and engineering and provide state-of-the-art facilities in growing technologies for electronic and photonic devices, biotechnology and advanced materials processing.

Cornell President Hunter R. Rawlings will announce the gift from David A. Duffield, president, chief executive officer, chairman and founder of PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif., a leading developer of software for manufacturing, distribution, financial and human resource management and for higher education, at the annual Cornell President's Circle Dinner in New York City, this evening (Jan. 22). Duffield has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (1963) and a master's degree in business administration (1964) from Cornell.

Duffield's gift, one of the largest ever presented to Cornell, will be the lead gift in support of the construction of a new campus facility, initially called the Engineering Research and Instructional Facility (ERIF) and now to be named after Duffield, that will include flexible laboratory space and multimedia classrooms for training the next generation of scientists and engineers at the nanostructure frontier -- the understanding of materials at the atomic and molecular level that make technological advances possible.

Duffield Hall, which ultimately will cost some $40 million, will be built on Cornell's Ithaca campus. Additional fund raising is underway in support of the project.

"David Duffield's leadership gift enables us to begin a major new academic initiative in critical technologies," said Rawlings. "We are grateful for his vision and his confidence in Cornell. Our students and faculty will benefit from Dave's generosity for generations to come."

"I am very pleased to be able to share some of PeopleSoft's success with Cornell University" said Duffield. "It is no secret that Cornell graduates -- and I had the pleasure of graduating twice -- keep a very warm place in their hearts for this superb institution. The education, both academic and social, that I received at Cornell enabled me to develop technical, analytical, interpersonal and important decision-making skills which have served me well as an entrepreneur and business person. I am also proud of the fact that Cornell University has become a strategic partner of PeopleSoft in the college and university marketplace."

The new facility will allow Cornell to train the next generation of engineers with faculty doing leading-edge research that will be of keen interest to industry in a facility that closely resembles that used by industry -- with clean rooms that eliminate contamination and are shielded from vibration and electromagnetic interference, the newest technology to meet and exceed environmental standards and flexible space to allow researchers to adapt to changing needs. It will provide an interactive environment that will bring together multiple academic disciplines within engineering and related fields and will be a major focus of Cornell engineering education for the next decade and beyond.

"Duffield Hall will enable Cornell to keep pace with the changing demands of interdisciplinary science and engineering required for education and research as we enter the next century and for the next 25 years," said John Hopcroft, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering at Cornell. "The new building will meet the research and instructional requirements of Cornell's faculty and students for the next few decades. The interdisciplinary nature of science and engineering education and research that we will undertake in this new facility will give us a strong competitive advantage."

Important areas such as unique materials, optical communication links, better and faster information storage, miniature robots for probing at the atomic level, and devices for diagnostics or minuscule prosthetics all will be the focus of research and instruction in the new facility.

Such goals require a new way of doing research, Hopcroft said. "The new mode of operation, involving interdepartmental faculty cooperation, is replacing one in which individual faculty members maintain a research program separate from others. A facility for the next 25 years must support complex tasks that require sophisticated teams of faculty and students. The Duffield building will be that facility."

Existing facilities, such as the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility and the Materials Science Center, are already leaders in advanced interdisciplinary research, but are at capacity and cannot be expanded. The new facility will allow researchers to build on the considerable strengths of Cornell's existing expertise. It will accommodate many newer, more advanced analytical instruments, some currently available and others on the horizon.

"The new facility will give us a cost-effective means of responding to industry demands, pushing the envelope of research in critical areas and educating future scientists and engineers for the new millenium," Hopcroft said.

Duffield has made significant technical and functional contributions to the development of enterprise applications software over the last 20 years. He directs PeopleSoft's management team and sets the tone for the company's hardworking, yet casual, corporate culture. PeopleSoft, named by Fortune magazine in 1994, 1995 and 1996 as one of the fastest-growing companies in America, is known for its "outrageous customer service."

Duffield established two mainframe application software companies before founding PeopleSoft: He was president, chair and chief product architect at Integral Systems, a California-based vendor of the first DB2-based human resource and accounting systems which grew under his leadership into a multi-product, international concern with revenues of $57 million, and he was a co-founder of Information Associates, where he was instrumental in the development of systems for the higher education market.

He began his career at IBM as a marketing representative and systems engineer.

The Nanostructure Frontier at Cornell

Cornell already is a leader in probing the atomic and molecular structures of materials. Advances in nonlinear optical materials, for example, will lead to better information storage and faster optical communication links. In experiments around the world, potential uses of nanostructures are spreading beyond the concept of a semiconductor integrated circuit that provides the brains for everything from computers to cellular phones. Cornell's new facility will foster such research, coupled with educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students.

Among the fields to be addressed at Cornell's new Duffield Hall are:

• Education. It will serve as a new meeting ground for faculty and students from various disciplines, providing an ideal environment for multidisciplinary education. Graduate and undergraduate students will have hands-on experiences with the newest technology. Undergraduates will have increased opportunities to engage in research, as graduate students prepare for jobs in industry or academia.
• Electronic and Photonic Devices. The world's largest industry, electronics, is the driving force beyond control, computation and communications. New high-speed devices require synthesis and fabrication of new materials at dimensions as small as only 100 atoms wide. Magnetic and optical materials, vacuum microelectronics, large-area displays and information storage all are dependent on new materials. Sensors for use in biology and chemistry are expected and the abililty to develop techniques for fabricating nanometer-sized components on a massively-parallel scale will be required.
• Characterization and Diagnostics of Materials and Devices. Researchers must be able to view devices at the atomic dimension in order to produce them. Cornell already has a strong program in atomic-scale characterization, including scanning transmission electron microsocopy capable of detecting one atom in a column of 400. The new facility will allow increased sophistication of atomic-scale experiments.
• Microelectromechanical (MEM) Devices. Within the semiconductor industry, MEM devices may provide the lithographic and diagnostic instruments of the future -- advances that are critically needed if U.S. industry is to meet its goals and continue its growth. MEM technology also promises revolutionary sensors that can emulate eyes, ears, nose and tongue. This technology is evolving at a rapid rate and has the capability of providing major breakthroughs in applications as diverse as displays, data storage, biomedical prosthetics and drug delivery systems.
• Advanced Materials Processing. One way of synthesizing new materials for optical, electronic and biological devices is to begin from the bottom. Construction begins with the assembly of nanostructures from atomic and molecular building blocks. Cornell already has expertise in these areas and it is expected that this will expand as new faculty members are recruited. By an extension of existing molecular-beam and organometallic vapor-phase epitaxy, atomically smooth layers will be fabricated to provide materials with novel properties for various electronic and photonic applications.
• Biotechnology Devices. Developments in devices for diagnostic or prosthetic applications that can be expected from miniaturization in biotechnology and bioengineering are ultra-rapid gene sequencing, chemical sensing for drug delivery and patterned templates for controlled cellular growth. Critical to this research is an interactive facility with the proper environment.