Nano, by Saad

Are you a M.Sc. science/engineering student in Sweden? Yes? Keep reading.

The Nanotechnology & Functional Materials group at Uppsala University is offering an examensarbete (masters thesis project) this fall on the topic of buckypapers. This project builds on the work reported in the 2010 Carbon and 2009 Chemical Communications articles listed here. (A more “pop science” take on this work can be found here.)

This is a smoked reindeer sandwich. You can find smoked reindeer in the deli section of your local grocery store where it’s called rökt renstek. I didn’t remember the Swedish word for turkey, so everything in the store was mystery meat except for renstek – see the logo on the packet. Also, it is delicious and I will probably eat a lot of it in my time here.

Props to scientist Carl Linnaeus for getting himself on the C-note.

This is Swedish money. In addition to the bills there are coins for 10, 5, and 1 kronor. The 10 kr coin is worth a bit more than $1 US, so it’s useful for tipping in bars and restaurants. The other coins are as useless as pennies.

Elsewhere: I lined up a 1-BR apartment for the summer and I stopped by the office (here) to apply for my key, access card, and online passwords. Got to chat with a few colleagues, and the conversations reinforced my belief that this was the right place to come work. The scientists are talented and the work in the group leans more toward applied science. I am excited to get started.

Future blog posts will revolve around my work and adventures in this new place, so if you’re interested in reading my stories and seeing my photos, take a moment to subscribe to the email notification on the right sidebar.

1. Finish PhD. Nothing more needs to be said after five years.

Dr. Sameer Mahajan (left) and Dr. Saad Hasan (right) with PhD advisor Prof. James Dickerson (center).

2. Vanderbilt Toastmasters club receives charter. Congratulations to the 21 chartering members of the new Vanderbilt Toastmasters club! The new-member materials arrived last week and will be distributed to everyone at the next meeting. This is the culmination of a year-long effort to grow the club’s presence at Vanderbilt. I am excited to see what the new officers will do next year, in terms of both cultivating amazing speakers who win at competitions (and job interviews and cocktail parties and dates) and staging campus-wide events that raise the club’s profile at Vanderbilt.

Very few things in life are as satisfying as a highly appropriate and effectively deployed metaphor.  Last month, with the start of the school year, our Materials Science program had its kickoff lunch to welcome the new students.  The centerpiece of this gathering is the Sales Pitch Contest, in which current students have three minutes to inform the judges (the new students) of their research and how awesome it is.

My friend Joy Garnett, starting her second year, works on linking together nanoparticles.  The motivation for this research is to have the nanoparticles serve as a conduit for light.  Without getting into hardcore condensed matter physics… the discussion of periodic structures—structures with a building block that is repeated with equal spacing, such as crystal lattices or photonic crystals—is nearly ubiquitous in materials science.  Unsurprisingly, Joy’s goal is to make her nanoparticles equally spaced apart and control the spacing between them.

In the three minutes allocated for her Sales Pitch, Joy did not explain the intricacies of why light behaves specially in periodic structures.  (Wise move, as new students haven’t taken condensed matter class yet.)  Instead, she told us about the classic video game, Super Mario Brothers. Read the rest of this entry »

I visited one of my scientific mentors last week and she gave me this advice: Become an expert in two areas. We did not pursue the topic further, discussing particular areas of materials research, for example, but her words remained in my thoughts after the visit.

Being knowledgeable in two areas certainly gives me more options when selecting research projects, but the real power of knowing two areas is the potential to combine them and discover something worthwhile in a third area.  One of my favorite books, The Medici Effect, calls this phenomenon “being in the Intersection.” The book relates the tales of a diverse collection of innovators, past and present (examples: Charles Darwin, Richard Branson, and the guy who invented the card game Magic The Gathering) and how they connected concepts from two seemingly unrelated wells of knowledge to make an astounding discovery and/or a huge pile of money. The book is a great read, and I’m glad my mentor’s words reminded me of it, because I know I should spend more time brainstorming intersectional ideas along with directional ideas (ones that seem to naturally evolve from a previous finding).

In my still-evolving scientific career, I have been fortunate to experience the Intersection once already. By combining electrophoretic deposition—an efficient technique for depositing nanoparticles into solid films from a suspension—with the use of a sacrificial layer—a concept from MEMS fabrication that allows thin sections of material to be suspended freely—we invented a new technique for creating standalone nanoparticle films. Our lab was already using electrophoretic deposition, but because I had previously studied MEMS and done some microfabrication work, I was able to draw from this second well of knowledge. This experience shows the value of collaborating with scientists outside of my field and even taking steps to branch out on my own from the confines of what I’m already comfortable with studying.

In any creative work, most of the ideas put forward end up unused or turn out to be ho-hum. The Medici Effect even points out that past success in finding an Intersection is no guarantee that someone will find it again. So the conclusion here would be: never stop thinking, never stop visiting new places and soaking up new concepts, and never stop trying out new (and seemingly crazy) ideas.

Not an article, but an essay: Hearts and minds and nanotechnology. Nature Nanotechnology 4, 136 (2009).

The timing of this piece’s publication, a week after I started my blog, could not have been more appropriate.  In my first post I wrote, “writing… about nanotechnology will be of even greater importance as the science makes its way into everyday-use devices.  Think about politicians: they practically live for uninformed demagoguery in exchange for votes.”

Now, this essay by Chris Toumey asserts that people’s opinions favoring/opposing nanotechnology are shaped heavily by their existing prejudices about science/technology and by their religious intensity.  While earlier surveys suggested that the more people knew about nanotech the more likely they were to support it, the amount of knowledge people have or acquire is unlikely to overcome existing biases.

For those who expect that people will embrace nanotechnology when they learn about the science, the… message… is that scientific knowledge in our minds is a weak companion to the strong values and concerns in our hearts.

If nanotechnology is to work its way into our lives and effect positive changes, we cannot afford to get bogged down in debates like those assigning scientific merit to both intelligent design and evolution, as if they were opposite sides of the same coin.  So what should you, the nanotech innovator who wants to change the world with your science, do in the face of these opinion hurdles?  I have three ideas.

1. Frame discussions to highlight the real-world benefits and de-emphasize the technical detail. Read the rest of this entry »

I needed a couple weeks to figure out how I want to present my “journal club” posts.  Each post will have three elements:

1. Technical background to help approach the topic
2. Description of the key findings reported in the article
3. Assessment of how the findings can be applied to the real world

On to this week’s article…

From Germanium Nanowires to Germanium-Silicon Oxide Nanotubes: Influence of Germanium Tetraiodide Precursor.  Nano Letters 9, 583 (2009).

Background.  This week’s article is on the synthesis of germanium (Ge) nanowires and germanium-silicon oxide nanotubes.  Ge is a semiconductor material with similarities to silicon (see periodic table) but one reason that silicon has been the integrated circuits workhorse is that its oxide is extremely stable and permits the fabrication of reliable field effect transistors.

Creating nanostructures of Ge allows access to certain properties that may be superior to silicon’s. Read the rest of this entry »