Tell us a bit about yourself and your background. What are you most passionate about?
I am a native Tulsan, and I started the company in the place where I was born. I'm passionate about other people and other entrepreneurs blooming where they are planted as well. As an entrepreneur and founder, I’m also passionate about giving people a good and respectful place to work. I didn’t realize before founding the company that people spend a lot of time in jobs in which this often isn’t the case. At Ten-Nine Tech, we focus on maintaining a respectful workplace and a place that rewards our team members for what they do. This allows them to express themselves and be the best at their jobs, and it has a lot to do with living a good and happy life overall. It's been surprising, even heartwarming, and important to me as a person, to feel as though I enable other people to achieve that in their workplace.

You’re the founder and CEO of Ten-Nine Technologies. What are you hoping to accomplish through Ten-Nine Tech?
I have two missions. The first is to develop and deliver the world's most powerful battery materials. We have to be a part of revolutionizing the electrification of the energy economy by making batteries work better. Batteries are a foundational tool for almost all other sustainable technologies. Reliable, renewable energy delivery depends on batteries, and batteries make an enormous difference in the life that we live every day. Most people think about battery life in terms of their cell phone, or an EV, but batteries are far more important in developing countries where they're running things – like light for a child to do their homework or an incubator to keep a baby alive. Batteries truly are one of those fundamental technologies that make a real-life difference to people around the world. And the second mission of Ten-Nine Tech is to build better batteries in a respectful workplace driven by our values of curiosity, generosity, and authenticity.

To date, what’s been Ten-Nine Tech’s biggest success?
Our biggest success to date is a scientific one - we were the first people to demonstrate fossil-fuel parity in a battery material. We developed a new material that is capable of delivering as much energy from the electrical reactions created in the battery material as can be garnered from combustion reactions in the burning of gasoline. That was an extremely significant demonstration, as no other batteries had come within a fraction of that sort of energy delivery, or energy density as we call it. Ever since then we've been working on how to practically use those energetic materials in batteries to make them perform better.

Why was it important to found your own company rather than working at an existing company? And what are some of the benefits and disadvantages of working at a startup versus working at an established company?
Let me tell you the story of how the company was started. I was approached by an angel investor while I was still working in academia who said, “you can't do what you need to do at a university,” and he was absolutely right! Universities do good things, but they're not set up to reach the marketplace or to make change in the marketplace. I think it’s important to recognize that. I've worked in academic, industry, and philanthropic settings, and I’ve learned that if you really want to change the world, you need to be in the marketplace. And the best way to do that is to found your own company. In addition, like many women I’ve found it very difficult to find a respectful and supportive work environment within existing companies. This is mainly because - for better or worse – existing companies (and universities, for that matter) were founded originally by men, and they were set up in ways that men found comfortable and appealing and that worked for them. It’s no wonder that women often find that existing workplaces don't work well for them. For me, it's been great to create a place in which the culture is respectful from the very beginning. It wasn't like we were trying to correct problems that other people set up. You're not trying to paint a door pink to get more women through it. You're just getting rid of the door and making a new entry. That’s one of the biggest advantages of founding your own company and building your workplace from scratch.

What advice would you give to a student who thinks they might want to start their own company someday?
I would encourage students who want to be founders to work at a startup. I certainly had an extraordinarily naive view of starting a business when I began in 2014. I've been able to overcome that deficit, but I would advise anyone to have a little more visibility on what a startup company looks like. One way to do that is to get an internship with a founder in your own community and bloom where you're planted. Don't think you have to go to Silicon Valley, or even work in the same type of company that you think you might start. But get a summer job with a start-up to see a glimpse of that world. Ask if you can shadow the founder - if you can sit down and talk to them about what the difficulties have been and how you should plan. Being on the inside somewhere and hearing from a founder who has walked that road is important. I’ve also found that once you start down that road, if you're a responsible person, you're very committed almost to the level of marriage or parenting. You are tied to that effort. It’s not something to take at all lightly but something to go into with seriousness and understanding. Learning from others will keep you from burning out or not being able to make and keep the commitments that you need to as a founder.

In an interview with Startland News, you noted a commitment to creating opportunities for women at Ten-Nine. What are the biggest hurdles facing women in technology startups?
The challenge for a woman founder is almost always that there are only women on one side of the table – and she’s the person asking for money or asking for a job, rather than the one handing out the money or hiring. When all of the managers or capital providers are men, that's never going to be a fair and equitable situation. Those men can be kind, they can see themselves as allies of women and advocates for women, but it is not an equivalent situation. The best way to overcome this huge hurdle is to get women on both sides of the table. When there are women on both sides of the table, whether that's a woman providing capital or a female founder interviewing for positions in a tech company, then opportunities for women will really change. The biggest outcome of not having women on the other side of the table is that women who found companies receive only two percent of the venture capital funding today. So, the biggest hurdle for women founders is simply getting capital. It means that you will have to pitch twice as many times as a man. You will have to answer twice as many questions, and it will take you twice as long. So right now, unfortunately, it's important for female founders to plan for that. I hope this will get better over time, but today, as a woman in technology, you must plan for what we know to be true.

One of the things I found fascinating about your bio was your breadth of curiosity including everything from children’s playgrounds to atomic gardening. Tell us a bit about your non-professional interests.
That's a lovely way to state it – “breadth of curiosity!” You know, of course, that curiosity is one of the company’s three core values. I find that because I'm a curious person, I want to create a company culture that's like myself in that way. Curiosity is obviously a key component of my personality and it's something we look for in the people that come to work for Ten-Nine Tech. I ask potential employees if they have a passionate second interest, and, as you noted, I have multiple passionate second interests. I often tell people that I have a hungry mind that works best when it is engaging with knowledge rather deeply. For years before I started a company I was blogging about children's playgrounds and the history of gardens. While I was still at the university, I was able to maintain all those interests and write about all those interests. I do love to write, which is something that has served me very well. As a founder, there's a little bit of additional advice to people wanting to start a company - you need to be a good writer. When you are early stage, you have to write your own press releases, your own ad copy, your own grants, your own reports, and your own board materials. Being a good communicator goes along ways towards giving you that additional boost toward success. Now about my non-professional interests - I love the creation of a space for people to inhabit. I love gardens. I love landscapes whether they are atomic gardens or children's playgrounds. I love to understand how humans deal with nature and utilize nature to create and inhabit space.

The last question is something we like to ask all our interviewees. If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what would the job be?
Because I like to delve deeply into things, I always have a far greater reading load than I can manage - from scientific papers related to batteries and nanotechnology to garden and history books. I've always said that my superpower would be to be able to touch a book and consume the knowledge in it immediately. As a lover of knowledge, I would hire a nanobot to read for me.

Paige, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today! Good luck making our electric future a reality!

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Tell us a bit about yourself. What are you most passionate about?
Hmm! I'm probably most passionate about enabling helpers and joy. This comes from a perspective of mortality and pessimism: I've got probably under 50 years of being able to do stuff, and there are lots of problems locally and globally that I feel powerless to fix. One tangible facet of being an educator, however, is empowering people to solve problems and teach, too, and that makes me hopeful some big problems get solved. It's also easy to forget that hilarious things are ubiquitous, and there's joy to be found in finding them, in discovering things, in helping others in spite of things not being perfect. I think it's very important to experience joy, especially in ostensibly "professional" settings, in order to do sustained work on hard problems.

One of your research goals is to “leverage thermodynamics for societal good”. What are some examples of this?
The sorts of things my team is trying to do include projects like discovering chemicals that are good ingredients for inexpensive solar panels, and understanding how the polymers used to make aircraft composites can be used to make stronger, lighter, more efficient aircraft at lower cost. In both cases, the properties of the materials, whether they're strong enough for airplanes or good at converting light into electricity, depends on how the molecules making the materials are arranged. The laws of thermodynamics govern how those molecules arrange themselves when we mix them together, and so we work hard to understand how to exploit those laws to work for us when making new materials. But the ultimate goal of the new materials we aim to invent is for them to be easy to make without harming the planet, reliable, and useful in helping people live safely and sustainably.

Experimentalists typically run experiments in labs to test how materials work. Theoreticians do calculations to predict how materials work. How would you describe how computational scientists work? Is it more experimental or theoretical?
There's wide variance in whether computational scientists lean more experimental and theoretical, and it's possible to do lots of both! Most of the time on my team, the work we do is more experimental: We set up an experiment using a computer, perform the experiment, and have a look at the results in the same way that someone using a fume hood or glove box might. We can do more experiments in a shorter amount of time, often, but when we're not working with theory to develop new kinds of experiments, we're mostly performing experiments using computers as the apparatus. 

High-performance computing using graphics cards dramatically expanded they types of simulations scientists can do. With the rise of machine learning and the potential coming of quantum computing, what do you predict materials research will look like in 10 to 20 years?
There's potential, and I am hopeful, that many arduous, important, but uncreative tasks will have been replaced with fast computations. For example, the creation and evaluation of the rules by which atoms interact in simulations is something we set up by hand right now, is very fiddly, and there's no fundamental reason we couldn't train a machine to do this for us. It looks like there's great potential for quantum computers to assist with the prediction of the electronic structure of molecules, which would put a whole set of techniques out of business. But I don't have a good sense for, theoretically, whether some fundamental problems in materials science are as "easy" as playing go for teachable machines. In 2015, I thought computers beating top professional players at go was 10 years away, and it happened in 2016. The successes of AlphaFold are super inspiring and I'm hopeful to see something similar be usable in predicting the structure of, say, polymer materials, for example. In summary, I think that in the next two decades it should be a lot easier to to predict the structure of materials from their ingredients, and because of this, those that can predict properties from structures or those that can figure out how to synthesize those structures will be even more sought after. 

The description in your Twitter account lists bikes and Go as interests in addition to science. How important is it to have interests outside science? Do these interests ever overlap with your research?
Without some balance it's possible to ruin anything. Like, eating one slice of pizza is great, but having to eat 500 in one sitting is terrible. The research I do gives me time away from riding bikes, which gives me time away from playing go. I love doing all of those things, but if could only do one of them I expect I'd have under 20 years of attention before I burned out at it. So they're different enough that I can get a break from one when doing another, but there's a ton of overlap between them! Fixing bikes and debugging code are identical processes on different machines. Finding the best move on a go board and finding the energy-minimizing structure of a polymer are essentially equivalent mathematically.  Winning a bike race and go tournament both require training, strategy, and split-second decision-making. In all three cases you can be a professional, and my experiences interacting with experts in each domain inform how I think about teaching, mentoring, competition, and supporting communities in the others.  

How would students describe what it’s like to work on your research team?
You should ask the students on our team! I hope they'd say it's a fun, supportive, interesting place to work and learn.

If you had to give a high school student interested in STEM careers advice, what would you say?
There are a ton of different careers that scientists, engineers, and mathematicians can do, and many of them you'll find interesting and fulfilling. Find them and do them, we need you! It's also a sad truth that many of the systems and practices in STEM education make students feel excluded from their classes, departments, and universities. Universities aren't immune to sexism or racism, and there's a lot of work to be done to make STEM opportunities more equitable. If you feel like sexism or racism hasn't mattered to your education so far, I'd invite you to use that privilege to help effect change. Reading broadly around the history of science and education is just as important as reading broadly about the the topics that got you interested in STEM careers.

If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what would the job be?
Delete emails before they reach my inbox? Haha, no, maybe turn things off that are wasting energy? OK. So, nanobot, huh? I'm interpreting "nano" as some things whose size is less than say 500nm, and "bot" to mean things that are programmable. So this is like 10x to 100x smaller than a red blood cell, so it'd be great to have some in my arteries disposing of plaque, allowing me to eat as much jamon iberico I want. But if we can program trillions of them to build more of each other, who can place the molecules in the right places for custom materials, then we're done, right? This is a tall order, though, because I know how hard it is to program things correctly, and how fiddly things are at nanometer scales, so I worry that half-reasoned attempts to do this end up causing more havoc than good.

Eric, thanks so much for taking time to talk with us! I look forward to reading your future publications!

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Tell us a bit about yourself. What inspired you toward a career in nanoscience?

Since a kid, I have always been passionate about design and engineering. When my friends were drawing Batman cartoons, I was drawing modifications to the Batmobile. After graduate school in Chemical Biology studying pathways involved in cancer, I wanted to move into more engineering and design. I wanted to solve problems, not just ask questions. As I was trained in biochemistry and specifically DNA structure and function, nanotechnology was an obvious application of my expertise to an engineering problem.

This past semester, you did undergraduate research with your organic chemistry lab students. Why is undergraduate research important? What challenges arise when conducting research with students?

Undergraduate research is about gaining appreciation for the material you are learning. Simply, putting it use. The most difficult part of undergraduate research is gaining independence. Independence takes time to develop and is a difficult journey of learning how to ask the right questions and plan ahead. When working with students, I am constantly trying to find a balance between guidance and independence. Especially early in their journey to independence, students need close guidance. The difficult part is finding the right time to step back and let them start to work independently. Again, this is a long process and the earlier students can start on the path toward independent scientist, the more they can accomplish.

What questions were you hoping to answer this semester?

My goal with research in the undergraduate classes is to provide appreciation for the science the students are learning. The current students have been embroiled in several years of the COVID pandemic disrupting their life, and I wanted to ensure that the students are connecting the science they are learning to their daily lives. In the lab section of the class, we worked on a genetic test for HIV mutations. Similarly to the coronavirus, HIV can mutate. A predominant mutation, G48V allows HIV to function in the presence of commonly used protease inhibitors therapies. In the lab section of the class, I showed the students how to coat DNA onto surfaces like glass to make a common bioassay for identifying G48V mutant HIV.

You yourself were once an undergraduate research student at Simpson. If you had to go back in time, what career advice would you give 18-year-old Derek?

Network more. Solving real problems requires a wide range of skill sets and viewpoints. I have found the most success in my career collaborating.

Is there any additional advice you'd give students looking to do research today?

Get involved in research as early as possible. Research provides an application to what you are learning and will certainly guide you to finding a true passion, a place to focus your attention in the vast world of science. Discovering your passion project requires many misadventures along the way to find the magical combination of a problem that you care about that matches your skill set, interests, and available resources.

Last Question: If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what job would you hire it to do?

I live in suburbia, which roughly translates into the "land of beautiful landscaping". The harder I work on my making my yard look good, the worse it gets. I need some nanobots to help - maximize soil nutrients, minimize invasive weed species.

Derek, thank you so much for taking time to catch us up on your work!

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I write science fiction and fantasy—mostly novels, but short stories too—and I’m best known for my high-tech science fiction. I live in Hawaii; it’s where I grew up and went to school. Quoting from my author bio, I’ve been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and an independent publisher. What am I passionate about? Well, the world, this world, the most interesting world there is, the only known living planet, the planet to which we are exquisitely adapted—yet so many of us fail to appreciate this amazing, beautiful, irreplaceable world, threatened now by global warming and an ongoing loss of biodiversity, and by war, and runaway technology. 

What sparked your interest in science and science fiction?

My dad was big into popular science—through TV and books—and that interest rubbed off on me. At the same time, I loved to read, and I loved adventure stories. The stories could be set in the wilderness, on a sailing ship, the seashore, or someone’s backyard—it didn’t matter. I was into it. It was an easy step from there to science fiction, especially since my dad loved the genre and always had books around.

You’ve been described as one of the pioneers of nanopunk fiction. What is nanopunk, and would you consider it an accurate description of your work?
 
It’s nice to be considered a pioneer, but nanopunk isn’t a term I use. I mean, most of my stuff is not very “punk.” I like the terms nanotech or biotech science fiction better, though granted those terms are not nearly as catchy!

What prompted you to write The Nanotech Succession series? What was it about nanotechnology that drew your interest?

Like so many people back then, I was inspired by K. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation–and I also knew just enough about biology and biochemistry to recognize that we are made up of naturally evolved nanomachines. So maybe some of this stuff was possible? And if it was, what then? That question was the seed from which the entire series grew.

Personally, I love the realism of your more unlikable characters. I’d say “villains”, but I’m not sure that’s the correct word, since they have a lot more complexity and depth of motivation than a typical movie baddie who just wants to destroy the world. I’m thinking of characters like Roxanne in Tech Heaven or Kirsten Adair in The Bohr Maker. How do you go about creating characters like that? Do you base them off real people? Perhaps an old boss?

I call them antagonists—and they all have their own story. In the two books you mentioned, the protagonists are exploring the bleeding edge of technology, pushing the envelope as far as they can. The antagonists are there as a foil, a means to make the protagonists’ quest more difficult, but also to represent an opposing view. There are a lot of reasons to legitimately oppose what the “heroes” are up to in these books. A good antagonist lets me explore issues from multiple points of view, exposing the positive and the negative. Kirsten Adair is cruel and brutal, but she’s got legitimate concerns. And Roxanne—I love Roxanne. She’s my secret hero because though she behaves badly, she’s mostly right.

One of our missions is to promote STEM and nanotechnology. Many of my colleagues attribute their initial interest in science to Star Trek or other science fiction works. Sci-fi and fantasy writers seem to be better than professional scientists at generating interest in STEM. What are some things science fiction writers can teach professional scientists about communicating effectively?

 “Sense of wonder” is a term often used in conjunction with science fiction, though only a segment of the genre is really interested in trying to evoke it. Still, I think that’s one key to capturing the interest of bright kids who might go on to do good things for the world. Try to communicate the sense of wonder that led you to your work, along with a can-do sense of the possible. This world is facing a lot of serious problems. Give young people reason to believe the research and problem-solving is all worthwhile.

Looking at science fiction from the 1950’s and 60’s, it seems like people at that time had a much more optimistic view of science and technology. For example, a lot of comic book heroes created at the time—characters like Tony Stark, Reed Richards, and Janet Van Dyne—were scientists or engineers. Star Trek depicted a life beyond the stars that included equal opportunities for people of all genders and cultures. I worry we’ve lost that sense of hope, because a lot science fiction created today is pretty dystopian. Scientists in today’s movies are usually the bad guys. Do you have any sense for what caused that shift? 

In part, I think, people are just more cynical and more aware that things go wrong. They know science does not always improve the world. Three things that popped into my head when I first read this question were DDT, Agent Orange, and nuclear war. All were huge concerns in that era. There was also a sense of hubris. I do think there are more good movies and shows these days dealing with STEM topics. For All Mankind is a recent one that really impressed me.

It’s interesting to look back at older science fiction and see how accurately it anticipated the future. Early writers envisioned a lot of the technologies we have today, but they often got things dramatically wrong. (I’m always amazed by the amount of smoking in Asimov books.) As you look back at some of your earlier work, are there any technologies that past-you would be impressed to learn she forecasted correctly? Are there any technologies she’d wish she had predicted?

I’ll leave it to readers to decide what I got right, but two things that have profoundly influenced the degree of difficulty in writing near-future fiction (things I didn’t struggle so much with in the early days) are the ubiquity of smart phones and surveillance cameras. Wow, those two things can drain the suspense right out of a lot of potentially dramatic situations! :-)

Last Question: If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what job would you hire it to do?

Ha! Every now and then, when I have an especially frustrating day getting basic technology to work properly, I pause and wonder if we’ll ever reach the point where we’ll trust the really tricky stuff to work. But just a single nanobot, huh? So many possibilities! Do I go with health? Or environment? I can’t decide!

Linda, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today! We look forward to reading your future work. If you'd like read more from Linda, you can find her books through various book sellers listed on her website.

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My career started in Graphic Design right before dropping out of college. That love for visual design has carried me through my entire career. I am very passionate about combining things I’m curious about and creating art with it. This can be an animation film, an illustration, or a feature film.

In 2013, you directed A Boy and His Atom, a stop-motion animated short film created by IBM Research scientists. The movie holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film. How did you get involved in this project?

At the time I was living in NYC and working with a production company. The way it works is a client, in this case IBM, works with their advertising agency, in this case BBDO and they look for director that can execute on their idea. BBDO had the idea of creating an animation using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. They knew that in the past, scientists had composed images using individual atoms. This would require pushing that technique to the extreme. I was invited to pitch my vision for the film among other filmmakers and was lucky enough to get it. That’s how the adventure started.

What exactly does it mean to direct a film with a STM? Did you get a chance to play around with the STM equipment?

The STM is an extremely complicated and extremely technical piece of equipment. The scientists let me move the joystick once, but they let kids touring the premises do that, so it was unrelated with my skills. The film had to be executed by the scientists. They were the animators. It was an exciting journey that started with findings ways of communicating my artistic ideas and transferring them to the technical language they needed to operate.

Your website lists a wide variety of professional interests and experiences including film, commercials, two books, and drawings. Did you also have an interest in science before making A Boy and His Atom?

Science is a big inspiration for my work. I found that basic science is no different than poetry.

Conventional animation can be incredibly time consuming. Animating by moving single atoms around using an STM must be even more so. How long did the process take?

The scientists spent 6 weeks nonstop animating the atoms. It’s an incredibly time consuming process. Exponentially slower than a traditional animation.

The thing I love about the boy in the film is that despite the fact that he’s made of only a handful of atoms, he’s remarkably expressive. Was that difficult to achieve?
Extremely difficult. We had to balance the character design and the story with the amount of operations the scientists could achieve in the timeline. A more complex character would have meant more pieces to move and more time that we didn’t have.

What’s harder: directing carbon monoxide molecules or directing people?
For sure Carbon Monoxide molecules. People renders themselves in motion!

On your website, the description of your book, Been there, done that, states,

A similar thing is true in science. We’re naturally curious and ask questions about the world around us until we reach a certain age. Do you have any advice for readers on how they can recapture that sense of creativity and curiosity we all had when we were younger?

One hundred percent! I truly believe that everyone, not only artists, have the duty to reconnect with child-like curiosity, this is the engine of great engineering, entrepreneurship and art.

Last question: You’ve directed a film made of nanotechnology. If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what job would you hire it to do?

Given the amount of work that takes, I would hire nano bots to bind to my adenosine receptors to prevent my neural activity to slow down making me feel tired. They would be the perfect substitute for coffee!

Nico, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today! If you'd like to learn more about Nico, visit his website at www.nicocasavecchia.com.

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Today's guest studies some of the largest objects in the solar system by examining some of its smallest objects. Dr. Sheri Singerling is a cosmochemist and author. She works as an instrument specialist for NanoEarth at Virginia Tech, where she uses scanning electron microscopy (SEM), focused ion beam (FIB), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to unravel mysteries about our early solar system.

Sheri, you’ve worked at a variety of interesting places including the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, US Geological Survey, and Natural Museum of Natural History. Tell us a bit about yourself and your career. What are you passionate about?

My background is in geology, but I’m a bit unusual because I study rocks (and dust) from space. I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy, but I didn’t really think to go into physics until I was already well into my geology degree during college. I figured out that I could combine my interest in rocks and minerals with my love of space by studying meteorites. So that’s what I did and am still doing! For my graduate degrees, I looked at meteorites from different types of asteroids, and then after I finished my doctorate, I had an excellent opportunity to study stardust (yes, actual dust from stars) for a couple of years. I investigate meteorites and stardust using really powerful microscopes called electron microscopes. These use a beam of electrons instead of light to image samples, and this lets us see to very high magnification (over 1 million times) and down to very small scales (the nanoscale). I’m obviously very passionate about studying these kinds of samples and learning about the Solar System in its earliest stages. It’s so fascinating to me that just by looking at these pieces of rock, we can learn about all the complex and strange things that were happening billions of years in the past.

How did you first get interested in science and nanotechnologies?

I’ve always gravitated towards the sciences. It was always my favorite subject in school, but for some reason, I was under the impression for the longest time that only “geniuses” could become scientists. I had really good grades, but I definitely did not feel like I was “smart” enough to be a scientist. Looking back, it seems strange that I thought that way, but part of the problem is that, as kids, we don’t see how science really works. So much of science is making mistakes and learning from them, not being “smart”. In any case, once I was in college, I took an introductory geology course as my science credit and, from that, realized that I could be a scientist. I will say that the nanoscience part of my expertise is much more recent. It was only when I started my doctorate that I started using a type of really powerful electron microscope that images down to the nanoscale. Because of that, I had to start thinking like a nanoscientist.

Your Twitter bio lists you as a “cosmochemist”. For those who don’t know, what does a cosmochemist do?

A cosmochemist studies cosmochemistry. Nothing like defining a word by using another word! Cosmochemistry is just a fancy term for the study of elements, their abundances, and where we find them (which minerals) in meteorites. It can give us clues about the processes happening in the early Solar System. For me, it’s not the kind of chemistry most people usually imagine, where you’re in a lab with a lot of chemicals and wearing a lab coat, safety glasses, and gloves all day. It’s more the periodic table kind of chemistry. I think a lot of elements and how they behave with one another.

When people think of nanotechnology, they often think of new materials and medical technologies made out of tiny particles. You study the early solar system. What can tiny things teach us about something as large as the solar system?

That’s an excellent point and one I also ran into when I first started thinking about myself as a nanoscientist. Anyone who either makes or looks at things on the nanoscale can call themselves a nanoscientist because we are all having to view our work through the lens of the very small. Materials behave very differently on the nanoscale. This is true of materials that we make and also those that are naturally occurring, like what I study. The reason I look at tiny things to learn more about the Solar System is because that’s where a lot of the secrets about how it formed are hiding. Most of the information about the Solar System’s beginnings has been obscured by more recent processes, especially on the Earth where we have things like plate tectonics and weathering changing the surface. Small bodies, like the asteroids, have been much less affected and still have lots of information about their past. That being said, we usually can’t just look at images of an asteroid to know what’s really going on with it. Ideally, we want information on the minerals that are there, which requires us to look on smaller scales. Something as simple as observing clay minerals in a meteorite can tell us that the asteroid the meteorite came from had water on it at one point. We now think that most of the water on Earth, including in all of us, was delivered by asteroids.

Your current job is at Virginia Tech’s NanoEarth. Tell us about the interesting work being done there.

NanoEarth exists to bring the nanosciences to the geosciences. Historically, the earth and environmental sciences have been relatively slower at incorporating nanoscience into research. Other fields like physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering have really embraced using nanoscience tools, but the geosciences have lagged behind. This is unfortunate, because, as I mentioned, there is so much we can learn about larger-scale processes from nanoscale investigations. At NanoEarth, we work with researchers interested in using nanoscience techniques and help them develop their projects, collect the data, and interpret the results. Anyone is welcome to participate, and we’re always looking for work to collaborate on. Our website has more information on how to apply.

One of the things I love about conversing with scientists is that they often have fascinating interests and hobbies even outside of their research. You self-published a novel, The Neohumanoids, in 2014. What’s it about and what led you into creative writing?

Creative writing is definitely a passion-project for me, and like science, it’s always been something that I’ve loved doing. I actually wrote Neohumanoids way back in 2006 and only got around to self-publishing it when I realized that was an option. It’s a science fiction novella (a short novel) about a scientist in the early 1900s who figures out how to stop aging using genetics. Like most of my creative writing, it’s hard science fiction, which is a subgenre of science fiction that presents the science very realistically and with a lot of detail. I find creative writing to be a nice outlet for my more artistic side. That’s not to say that you can’t be artistic in science, but scientific writing is very constraining. In science papers, you are trying to present your findings in a very clear, concise way. It’s nice to get to break the rules and really do whatever you want in creative writing. I’m actually just wrapping up edits to a new novel I’ve been working on the past couple of years, but I’ll be trying the traditional publishing route this time around. Wish me luck!

What advice would you give a 12-year-old who isn’t sure if she’d rather be a scientist or an author?

I would say, you can be both! There are plenty of examples—Issac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, and Carl Sagan to name a few. What really matters is doing what you love. There is always time to figure things out, and when you are still a student, you should use the opportunity to try out as many different subjects as you can. Being well-rounded is useful to both scientists and writers. Explore!

You describe yourself as a passionate environmentalist. If you had to recommend one habit our readers could adopt to be more environmentally friendly, what would it be?

There are so many choose from, but if it had to be down to one, I would say that composting is an easy habit to pick up that makes a huge difference. Composting is just recycling your food scraps into fertilizer rather than throwing them in the trash. If you have your own yard, you can do backyard composting, but if you’re in an apartment, you can try worm composting. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that offers it, there are also composting collection/drop-off programs all over. These have the added bonus of usually also accepting meat and cheese scraps, which you can’t compost if doing it on our own. You could also push your local officials to implement such a program if you don’t already have one. Composting is an amazing science project of its own, and it does wonders for cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions. Did you know that everything you send to the landfill doesn’t actually break down? Landfills are designed this way. Why send food scraps to landfills if we can break them down ourselves?

Last Question: If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what job would you hire it to do?

Could I hire a swarm of them to do my dishes? I really spend so much time on dishes somehow. No but seriously, I would say I’d hire a nanobot to do a final pass on the samples that I make so that they were as nice and thin as possible. In my research, I use a technique called the focused-ion beam (FIB) to cut a thin slice of my meteorite or stardust samples. I look at these on the transmission electron microscope (TEM), which requires very thin (~100 nanometers) samples so that the electron beam can go through the sample. One of the most time-consuming parts of my research is just preparing these thin slices with the FIB. I’d be thrilled to have a nanobot do all the stressful final touches on my samples. That might cut back on some of my gray hairs.

Sheri, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today! We'll get to work on the dish washing nanobots. If you'd like to learn more about the Sheri, you can find her on Twitter or check out her novella The Neohumanoids. To learn more about NanoEarth, visit their website.

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Hello Nanotech Enthusiasts,

In an effort to showcase interesting nanoscience research, we're kick starting a Q&A blog this year. We've got a great first guest. Andres Canales is a Senior Laboratory Engineer at Advanced Silicon Group (ASG). ASG is developing the next generation biosensors.

Andres, tell us a little about yourself and your background.

I just reached two years of being the Senior Laboratory Engineer at ASG. Before that I was working as a researcher in the Bioelectronics Group at MIT, where I spent 9 years. I got my Master's degree and PhD in Materials Science and Engineering, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow during that time. Before coming to MIT, I got my Bachelor's degree in Chemistry at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in my native Mexico City.

How did you get interested in nanoscience/engineering?

As you can tell, I have been interested in science/engineering for a long time now. Even before entering college, I knew that I wanted to get into science or engineering. During college, I took classes on many subjects of chemistry, but the ones that interested me the most were those relating to materials science. This branch focuses on understanding how the structure of a certain material (or collection of materials) affect its performance. This is very important when you are dealing with nanostructures, as you can have completely unexpected behaviors due to the extremely small sizes you deal with.

A good example is that of hydrophobicity. This is just a measurement of the degree to which water "sticks" to a certain surface. If you have ever seen a drop of water on a newly waxed car, you will notice that its shape is much closer to a sphere than what you would see on a dirty car, where the shape is much flatter. This is due to the wax on the car being hydrophobic. The amazing thing about nanoengineering is that if you can control the shape of a surface down to the nanometer (1 millionth of a millimeter) scale, you can control the hydrophobicity of that surface.

The idea of being able to understand and use this type of surprising, but extremely useful phenomena, attracted me to this field.

What drew you to ASG?

I learned of the technology that ASG was using, in which we take advantage of the nanoscale shape of the surface to increase the sensitivity of our sensors. Not only is the technology something that I am very interested in, but I was also drawn in by the possible applications.

ASG’s core technology is a silicon nanowire array produced by texturing silicon using metal enhanced etching. What is this structure useful for?

This specific structure is useful for a very, very wide range of applications. In ASG, however, we focus on the increased sensitivity of this structure to things that happen very close to the surface of our devices. This allows us to achieve lower limits of detection (we can detect smaller concentrations) and higher sensitivity (we can distinguish between two very close concentrations). We currently focus particularly on biosensors, which can be used in a lot of areas, such as medical diagnostics.

What can you detect with this biosensor? How sensitive is the method, and why are silicon nanowires better than other sensor technologies?

Right now, we focus on detecting proteins. If we have proteins dissolved in a certain solution, it might be interesting to know which proteins we have in solution, and also how much of each protein we have. In medicine, for example, this could help to determine if certain body functions are working appropriately, or too slow or too fast. We are still working on understanding how much can we take advantage of nanoscale effects to push the sensitivity of our sensors, but the main advantage of nanowire sensors with respect to non-nanoscale sensors is the added knob that we have. By controlling this knob, the exact shape of the surface, we can tune our device to make it more sensitive.

How has COVID affected ASG’s work? Did the company have to change how it did research? Are you seeing increased interest in certain applications?

When I joined ASG on January 2020, we were a very small company, with two full time employees. When COVID hit a couple of months later, with the accompanying lockdowns that followed, we were still able to do quite a bit of work from home. Since there were very few of us, there were quite a few things we needed to take care of, and we made use of those 3 months to do them. However, ASG relies on a lot of work in the lab. In the end, we need to do a lot of fabrication and chemistry which can't be done at home. Fortunately, we were able to resume normal operations after those 3 months. So in general, COVID slowed us down a little, but I don't think we were affected as badly as you often hear from other businesses.

The pandemic has certainly increased interest in the possible application of our sensors as COVID at-home tests. Since our measurements are much faster than many of the currently available methods, if we could tune our sensors to detect COVID proteins, we could in theory have everyone do a self-test before leaving home every day. This would help make decisions on whether it is safe to go certain places a lot easier. Unfortunately, making this change to our sensors is not as straightforward as we would like, so we haven't been able to reach that point.

Last question: If you had to hire a nanobot to do a job for you, what job would you hire it to do?

It would definitely have to be an imaging nanobot. Particularly one with microscopic capabilities (ideally would have resolution in the milli- to nanoscale). Maybe it would send the images to a computer via Bluetooth or something like that. It would be relatively easy to guide this bot through small channels and openings using air or water currents. You could then use this nanobot to see the structure of any surface easily, even in porous materials. You could also use this bot in the body and see individual cells. You could see them growing, dividing, etc., and you could see any damage on certain tissues. This would not only be very interesting from a curiosity perspective, but also very useful in healthcare. Other applications would be to detect and monitor fractures in the parts of, for example, airplanes. This would make flying so much safer!

Andres, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today! If you'd like to learn more about the ASG, go to their website at https://advancedsilicongroup.com/.

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