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Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology - McMaster University/University of Toronto

Nanotechnology holds the promise of transforming virtually every high-tech industry from advanced manufacturing to life sciences to information technology. Unlocking and harnessing its potential requires four essential elements. Great Science. First class research infrastructure. Innovative industry. And a supportive government. Ontario has all that - in a positive investment climate.

Transcription:

McMaster University / University of Toronto
John S. Preston
Director, Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research
McMaster University

The Brockhouse Institute was the first interdisciplinary materials research center in North America. It’ll be celebrating its 40th anniversary next year. It’s also the proud home for the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy which will house perhaps the world’s most powerful capability in terms of looking at materials on nano-scale. The institute has been around long enough that we’ve actually been working in nanotechnology before it was called nanotechnology and we now play an important role in terms of enabling all of the other activities that are taking place on campus, having to do with fabricating nano-scale devices to implementing them into systems. And so our role is to try to facilitate the materials development and the materials analysis to try to make those things happen.

Some of these technologies that are produced will be incremental. They’ll just simply lower costs or provide added value to the ultimate customer. In other cases they’ll be extremely disruptive and it will just change the way that we can do things. One of the interesting features of nanotechnology, the research is very expensive, but often the implementation is very inexpensive. So we use sort of very expensive microscopes and other tools, we use very expensive fabrication tools because we’re trying to have a versatile research environment where we can make many different things. But then if you reduce that to practice where you’re actually making a single item quite regularly you’ll find that the nanotechnological approach is the least expensive approach. And so that means that although some of the original ideas may seem science fiction-like, pie in the sky, the implementation can happen very quickly and the barriers that may have existed towards a traditional route my be brought down, which can allow sort of new enterprises to start up very quickly. It also means exiting companies have to be on their toes to keep an eye on what’s coming down the pipe.

Harry E. Ruda
Director, Energenius Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology
University of Toronto

There’s some absolutely leading edge people here at the U of T doing some exceptional work particularly on the materials and structures end of nano. So example being people like Geoff Ozin self assembling structures, John Polanyi looking at phenomena surfaces and so forth, all the way through to structures like for example photonic structures, electronic structures that push the edge in terms of computing, communications, sensing, biology, by taking into account some of the fundamental science we do here. So we stress the science of materials and structures and putting them into practice.

The climate in terms of infrastructure, funds for infrastructure and existing infrastructures are very, very good. Hasn’t been that way from the beginning but certainly improved through initiatives from the federal government and also the provincial government, through the CFI program and also the ORF, Ontario Research Foundation. That’s enabled us to get the tools and the facilities. And when you combine that with the expertise it’s a kind of dynamite combination. And also Toronto in particular here is a very nice place to live. It’s a safe, clean city, it’s a multicultural place, it’s a good place if you like to live and to bring up a family as well as to do research.
 
In terms of graduate students here in Ontario it’s actually a lot cheaper from our perspective to train them. In the states it can be factor of three, four or five times, depends on which University we compare ourselves with, in terms of the cost of training a graduate student. On the other side of the coin because of these infrastructure initiatives I mentioned earlier, that have brought us really state of the art tools and facilities and capabilities here at the university. These students are exposed to and trained on some of the best equipment you’re going to find anywhere in the world. And back again to the point I made that we have really some real superstars here at the university. The students get guided by top quality people. And you couple that with the sort of industrially relevant research that we do, where companies get involved and we try and apply some of these ideas to their problems, so the students get to see…those graduate students get to understand how to apply themselves to real world problems and yet at the same time doing the fundamental work.

Dr. Gianluigi Botton
Canada Research Chair in Microscopy of Nanoscale Materials
McMaster University

In fact there were many opportunities for me to stay in Europe when I was doing my post doc in Cambridge or go to the US. And what I thought the best opportunity for me at the time was to come back to Canada because there were lots of new interesting developments in research. And I decided to come specifically to McMaster because there’s a very good department of materials science & engineering, very good researchers and a lot of interaction between different researchers in different departments. So very good inter-disciplinary research and a lot of interaction also with industry and that I think is really what motivated me to come to McMaster and I think it’s very unique what you find here compared to other universities and other jurisdictions.

There’s no doubt that with the infrastructure we’re developing at the moment we’re going to be really ahead of a lot of other people, many other countries. Because of the very important investment in the last few years and so a lot of people benefit. Behind the technology there’s a lot of ground work that’s done with materials research development, more powerful computers, more smaller cell phones, telecommunication systems and so on. So people don’t realize that nanotechnology is not there on it’s own but it’s supporting a lot of new developments in many, many fields of research.

Dr. Peter Mascher
William Sinclair Chair in Optoelectronics
McMaster University

Well nanotechnology is of course an area that is, and has been for a number of years now, of broad International interest. So in many of the developed countries, in Europe and in North America and in Asia, very large nanotechnology clusters are being established both on the academic side but also partnerships with industry.

In Canada and in particular in the Province of Ontario, there has been a lot of investment in nanotechnology related research but it hasn’t, up to now at least, has not been totally coordinated. It was more so based on initiatives by individual researchers or initiatives at individual universities. The newly established Ministry for Research and Innovation built a working group on nanotechnology and this working group is tasked with exploring what the opportunities are particularly with respect to the Province of Ontario towards establishing such a cluster and which areas of research in the broad field of nanotechnology the Provincial investment should focus on. There was broad consensus that one of the significant strengths in Ontario across the academic spectrum and even going into industry is in the area of advanced materials. Materials design, that is you have certain applications in mind and you want to develop new materials that can satisfy certain needs; but then also materials fabrication, the materials processing and then ultimately actually taking these materials and making functional elements out of them.

	John S. Preston Director, Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research McMaster University
	Harry E. Ruda Director, Energenius Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology University of Toronto
	Dr. Gianluigi Botton Canada Research Chair in Microscopy of Nanoscale Materials McMaster University
	Dr. Peter Mascher William Sinclair Chair in Optoelectronics McMaster University

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