BLACKSBURG -- Just the title may cause some eyes to glaze over -- the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science.

But to hear ICTAS Director Roop Mahajan talk about it, there couldn't be a more exciting time to be in charge of a research institute that just opened its first building.

"These days technology comes at you like a wave, like a gale, like a storm," he said. "It destroys everything in front of it. These are wind storms of creativity."

And Mahajan's job is to help Virginia Tech researchers harness these storms rather than getting blown away by them. ICTAS provides infrastructure and seed money and brings together researchers, faculty and students from different disciplines.

"Suddenly the buds of creativity bloom," he said. "We cross those boundaries, those boundaries don't exist anymore."

The ICTAS acronym has been used for about a decade at the university, and plans have been in the works for years to construct buildings for the institute. But Friday marked the dedication of the first building -- ICTAS A -- in Tech's Corporate Research Center.

The two-story, 32,000-square-foot structure cost about $8 million to build. It will house the Nanoscale Characterization and Fabrication Laboratory, offices and more than $10 million in research equipment.

Nanotechnology is one of four overlapping areas that ICTAS is focusing its research on along with sustainable development, cellular and molecular biology and cognitive systems and communication. Mahajan said the intersection of these technologies will be a theme of the 21st century. And the possibilities are limitless.

"Can I take a cancerous cell and make it benign by stretching it?" he asked. "I don't know. But we can explore it."

The brainchild of former associate dean for research and graduate studies Malcolm McPherson, who introduced the idea in 1997, ICTAS provided seed money to Tech researchers last year that brought in nearly $30 million in external funding.

Mahajan, who was named the first full-time director of the institute about a year ago, hopes that research funding will grow to $50 million or $60 million in a few years.

The institute has set a 5-to-1 investment ratio as its standard for funding research. In other words, for every $1 in seed money for research projects, ICTAS expects at least $5 in external funding in return.

Since Tech President Charles Steger announced a goal for Tech to reach top-30 status in the National Science Foundation's research spending rankings in 2000, the university has actually dropped from No. 50 to No. 56. Research projects nursed by ICTAS seed money and funded by government agencies and industry would help reverse that trend.

Georgia Tech's research institute does more than $100 million in applied research a year, helping contribute to the school's No. 31 ranking. That institute and Virginia Tech's own Center for Innovative Technology, which led a charge at the school for research in areas such as fiberoptics and wireless technology in the 1980s, serve as models of success that ICTAS hopes to follow.

But it's more than research for research's sake, Mahajan said.

"We take laws of physics, laws of chemistry, laws of nature, and we do something useful for society. And there's nothing more empowering than that," Mahajan said. "I think right now we're in the early stages of our 's' curve, where the elements are in place. All the planners and the stars are aligned."

Last year's research awards total was about double what it was in 2005.

The new building will be followed by an on-campus structure -- ICTAS I -- scheduled for completion next summer. The role those buildings will play in continuing research growth can't be overstated, Mahajan said.

"It's very essential that we not only provide that intellectual environment, but we also want to provide facilities, laboratories. Without those tools -- those are our tools -- we cannot do anything," he said. "So I think it is one place where this facility will act as an incubator, as an engine for new ideas."