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GREENSBORO — Jim Ryan’s desk is a mess.

Science journals, building schematics, dozens of business cards laid in rows.

One look and you get some idea how busy he’s been since becoming dean of UNCG and N.C. A&T’s new Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering last June.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Ryan says as he clears a space for a can of soda. “I’ve always been sort of a piler.”

A little mess is to be expected. Ryan has an enormous task before him — creating a cutting-edge school from the ground up. From his new office at the Gateway University Research Park in Browns Summit, he’s well on his way.

In six months, Ryan has created a curriculum, helped design the coming labs and buildings, and begun a search for faculty. Though much of the campus doesn’t technically exist yet, Ryan says he hopes to start admitting graduate students as soon as this fall.

A large, deep-voiced man who seems more football coach than world-class scientist, Ryan is fond of sports metaphors. When explaining his plan for the nanoscience school he jokingly quotes baseball great Yogi Berra: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

Ryan seems sure where he’s going even if it’s hard to explain. When his school opens it will be one of the only institutions in the world granting degrees in nanoscience, a field most laypeople don’t understand beyond science fiction.

“It’s hard for people to understand because it’s not something you can see or hold,” Ryan says. “But basically what you’re talking about in nanoscience is manipulating very small things — atoms and molecules below 100 nanometers — for specialized purposes.”

Those purposes are all around if you know where to look, from technology that gives pocket-size cell phones more computing power than was used in the first space missions to neckties that repel stains. Ryan says it’s estimated that nano innovations will have a $2.6 trillion impact on the world economy by 2014 whether we notice them or not.

“I always tell people that it’s kind of like that old BASF commercial,” Ryan says. “You know, 'We don’t make things; we make things better.’ ”

Of course, nanoscience and nanoengineering can make things. In the near future the science, which is really an amalgam of sciences, could be instrumental in creating implantable medical devices that would release medicine in the body or allow doctors to monitor and test patients without painful, invasive procedures. How many men would be willing to get colonoscopies, Ryan wonders, if it was as simple as swallowing a tiny pill that gives a doctor the picture?

Much of what could come of nanoscience hasn’t yet been imagined. Which is one reason Ryan left his job as associate vice president of technology and professor of nanoscience at the University of Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering to create the new program in Greensboro. The more schools like this that exist, Ryan says, the faster the science will develop.

“When you get a diverse team of highly intelligent people together, that’s how innovation happens,” Ryan says. “When someone is working on something and is able to say, 'Hey, the guy who knows that, who could help me, is right across the hall.’ That’s the convergence that leads to new ideas.”

It’s easy to forget Ryan is a scientist when he talks this way. He may be a professor, a seasoned administrator and inventor with 47 U.S. patents to his name. But talking about innovation, about a better future so close you can nearly touch it, brings out the kid in him.

“Scientists are always excited about science,” he explains. “When we can explain it to other people, when we can get them excited, that’s a good day.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com