As administrators and faculty from fields as varied as molecular biology and engineering start coming together to develop a multidisciplinary curriculum for the new California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), one of the key challenges will be making sure that researchers and students from vastly different scientific realms can speak the same language.

That's just one crucial piece of the foundation that will need to be laid for the institute - a partnership between UCLA and UC Santa Barbara announced in December by Gov. Gray Davis as one of three California Institutes for Science and Innovation.

"Because of the nature of the work that's being done, which is highly cross-disciplinary, one of the major challenges that we're going to have in education is basically vocabulary," said James Heath, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a scientific co-director of CNSI. "People from medicine may be working on similar problems that people in engineering are working on, but they have no clue that they are because the vocabulary is different."

While the institute is expected to develop the technologies for inventions that range from more efficient lightbulbs to advanced medical diagnostic tools, it will also be the training ground for a new breed of scientist.

"In a way, we are training the scientific linguists of the future," said Roberto Peccei, UCLA's vice chancellor for research. "It is difficult to do that in a university because we all have these various departments, and even though people are quite happy to work across boundaries, it's just difficult to get courses and training that really happen across boundaries."

To create a truly multidisciplinary institute and ensure the smooth cross-pollination of ideas and research, the institute is planning to offer short seminars for faculty and students to learn each other's vocabulary and the underlying similarities of the systems they are studying.

The tutorials would be set up so that a researcher could explain his or her work - regardless of whether it's in genetics or computer science - in a language that would be understood by non-experts, administrators said.

Such training, Peccei said, could lead to tremendous discoveries in science and engineering done on the length of a nanometer, or a billionth of a meter. At UCSB, for example, scientists in biology and materials science have already collaborated to create materials of incredible strength by replicating the elaborate biological template of sea sponges.

"One would hope that by training students broadly, these kinds of examples would be easier to find and we would be able to make progress more rapidly," Peccei said.

The seminars may be open to a broader audience that includes corporate partners. That idea appeals to many of the 30 corporations that have so far pledged some $50 million in matching funds to the $100 million committed to the institute by the state, Peccei said. Organizers may create a certificate program for individuals who complete certain seminars.

Administrators are also considering creating exploratory laboratories "where our colleagues from industry could come and work with faculty to carry out experimentation that might take some of the fundamental discoveries just a step further," said Martha Krebs, the institute's director and former U.S. assistant secretary of energy.

For the college student of the future, the institute plans to create nanoscience exhibits and work with K-12 students in children's science centers and other venues throughout California. Already, UCSB scientists have been working with students from a technical high school in Ventura County.

"What began with Santa Barbara has now become a California NanoSystems Institute effort, and it is my hope that we will find schools to partner with closer to UCLA," Krebs said.