This summer, 70 graduate students, postdoctorates and non-Ph.D. faculty will gather in Pullman to participate in a nano-technology summer school.
Kerry W. Hipps, professor of chemistry and material science, has received a grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS-PRF) to finance the Summer School on Physical Chemistry on the Nanometer Scale, July 27 – Aug. 23.
“Right now I have more applicants than slots,” Hipps said. The intent of the workshop is to educate people who will take current research on nanotech-nology and build upon it.
“There are two big words in modern science today: biotechnology and nanotechnology,” Hipps said. “Those two concepts are not independent of each other. Everything that happens on a molecular scale can affect biotechnology, so they meet each other on a nanometer scale.”
A nanometer, according to Hipps, is the size of a BB if the distance from Seattle to New York is one meter. Or, five atoms lined up is also the size of a nanometer. Nanotechnology is potentially the new industrial revolution, but classes on this science are scarce.
“There aren’t many courses in nanotech because it’s so new. Courses that are offered tend to focus on biotech. We need to start training people,” Hipps said. “What we’re looking for is people who are involved in educational settings where they can teach others what they learn. It will be a mixture of graduate students, postdoctorate students and four-year college faculty.”
“Most of what we teach in undergraduate classes is about huge collections of molecules. Almost every experiment has to do with Avogadro’s number but when you’re down to a single molecule, none of that applies anymore,” Hipps said. “What we’re trying to find out is what happens on an individual molecule basis — the scale of nanometers. What we hope to do is present what we know at this stage, which is not nearly complete, to people who are just beginning their careers as professional scientists.”
The summer school staff will be comprised of Hipps’ colleagues.
“I think I have a great team of faculty members from all over the country — really first-rate people. The whole reason I wrote the grant was because I think it’s very important for our society to do this right now” he said.
There will be nine direct instructors and a scribe. The scribe will take notes in lectures and help organize a written summary of the week’s topics. “We’re not sure how we’ll publish it yet, but there will be a recorded history made available to anyone that wants it,” Hipps said.
ACS-PRF, the funding institution, was established in 1944 by seven major oil companies and is now administered by the ACS to fund research in the petroleum field. Petroleum is defined broadly so that funds can be awarded to a variety of different research projects.
“There’s a lot of basic science that goes into how petroleum works. PRF is one of the last funding agencies in the U.S. to fund basic science. A lot of agencies have directives and focused needs, and strangely enough, the one that sounds like they’re about petroleum research is just about good basic science,” Hipps said. “It’s a great idea to put industrial money into this knowing that there may be a big payback in the future.”
