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Images of Gallium-catalyzed Silicon oxide nanowire assemblies created by UGA's Zhengwei Pan
Thinking Big on the Smallest Scale
By Alan Flurry
“THE STATE OF THE ART in nanotechnology is truly a moving target,” says Yiping Zhao, and in many ways, this is just as it should be. Zhao, a Faculty of Engineering member from the UGA Department of Physics and Astronomy, is himself poised on the leading edge of this promising field. Involved in many aspects of nanoscale research - from the design and fabrication of nanostructures for a variety of uses including disease diagnostics, drug delivery and hydrogen storage, to his most recent publication featuring the development of tiny nanomotors - Zhao, an associate professor, has become a recognized expert in the field.
“The nanoscale is a matter of putting all of the fundamentals of physics, chemistry and engineering together and testing the imagination of what can be done on this scale. I believe that’s why it’s attracting so many of the great young researchers,” Zhao says.
Of this last point, he has some fine evidence right in his own lab. The research on catalytic nanomotors, published in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, was co-authored by post-doctoral researchers Yuping He and Jinsong Wu. These tiny machines, which could one day be the tools to open constricted blood vessels or to deliver drugs by drilling through cells walls, are evidence of this growing new area of engineering activity that is attracting students and faculty.
One of those is Zhengwei Pan, a new member of the Faculty of Engineering whose focus is the fabrication of functional nanomaterials with potential applications in energy, national security and biology as photocatalysts, phosphors, detectors and sensors. But Pan also appreciates some of the difficulties the general public may encounter in understanding nanoscale research. To this end he prepares images of his research in order to pad the understanding of its quest, as well as its context. “For these applications, you must have very high quality materials. We choose beautiful images from our data, to capture the imagination of the public and bring more attention to nanotechnology. If we only publish a paper, only people within certain circles will know about the work; others wouldn’t know about the potential for these materials,” Pan says. And he is not alone in his assessment; his images have been chosen as cover art for several nano-centered publications. At UGA, Pan and Zhao have even teamed with a faculty member from the Lamar Dodd School Of Art, Michael Oliveri, to enhance images of their data to share with the public. As they extend their collaborations into the arts, these UGA faculty have become real ambassadors for nanotechnology, reflecting their dedication to the research and the public which stands to be the real beneficiaries of these efforts.
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