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David Tsu, CEO of SolarMax Technology Inc.

A company that markets solar panels and has a very bullish outlook about the future demand for its products is relocating its operations to a historic but long-abandoned Riverside building and hopes to employ as many as 1,000 people there, a spokesman said Wednesday, Aug. 15.

SolarMax Technology is remodeling the old Food Machinery Corp. building adjacent to the Metrolink station near downtown Riverside. The company will bring its corporate headquarters, including full sales and office staffs, employees who arrange customer financing and some distribution personnel, to the location by the end of the year.

Also, installation crews putting up solar panels on rooftops all over Southern California will work out of the Riverside headquarters, said Guillermo Santomauro, SolarMax's sales manager.

The company, which was started in 2008, has its American headquarters in the City of Industry. It is moving to a 165,000-square-foot building on Twelfth Street in has purchased in Riverside.

SolarMax targeted Riverside because it believes this is a strong market for residential sales of solar equipment. Santomauro added that a lot of green technology is already in play in Riverside and the surrounding area. Even the parking meters are solar-powered, he said.

"Part of the move is location," Santomauro said. "Riverside is a great market, and it's only going to get better." (Read the full Press-Enterprise article here.)

SolarMax has been working with City of Riverside officials to navigate the process and preparation for a complicated renovation and retrofit.  City Manager Scott Barber explains "SolarMax is precisely the type of company that we want to have invest in Riverside; city staff have been and are committed to working alongside the SolarMax team to get them up and running and creating jobs as quickly as we can."

(includes excerpts from the July 5, 2012 Bourns College of Engineering press release)

Winston Chung Professor of Energy Innovation David Kisailus has received three grants totalling $1.75 million from the Department of Defense to study and understand the unique structure and function of biomineralized organisms in order to develop a new generation of scalable high-performance biologically-inspired multifunctional materials.

Kisailus, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, recently published an article in the journal Science that describes the unique structure of the club-like arm of the mantis shrimp, which can accelerate the arm underwater faster than a 22-caliber bullet. This highly complex mineralized arm is comprised of three specialized regions that work together to create a structure tougher than many engineered ceramics. It is used as a model in the Kisailus' lab to develop advanced materials with many applications, including military body armor and vehicle and aircraft frames.

In addition to the mantis shrimp study, at least two other projects that are a part of the funding that will bridge biology, materials science and mechanical engineering in order to create new technological capabilities for structurally relevant systems and enhance basic knowledge in design principles of composite-based materials. The use of natural/synthetic interfaces combined with solution-based processing will enable control of crystalline structures that ultimately will lead to optimized performance and durability.

Sincerely,

Scott C. Barber