Images captured using electron microscopes housed in RTNN’s Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF) at Duke are featured in a recent Duke News article. Read the whole story here and see amazing images of horseflies and weevils at 300,000x magnification.
RTNN Faculty Team Wins GRIP Award!
Led by RTNN director Dr. Jacob Jones, a team of researchers from NC State, UNC-CH, Duke, and RTI has been announced as a GRIP (Game-Changing Research Initiative Program) awardee for their project “Water Sustainability through Nanotechnology: Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the Solid-Water Interface.” Water is a fundamental requirement for life. However, universal access to clean water has become a crisis facing society, evidenced by continuing droughts and contaminated water supplies in major population centers. There is an emergent need for innovative, sustainable technologies to improve and maintain worldwide availability and quality of clean water. Development of new materials, membranes, and separation processes are essential to more efficiently create drinking water from salt water (desalination), reclaim clean water from waste and local streams (wastewater and point-of-use treatment), and to recover contaminants of value from water (resource recovery). Engineered nanotechnologies and nanomaterials can be used to uniquely address many emerging challenges in water sustainability due to their high surface area, reactivity, and surface and interfacial phenomena. Empowered by a multi-agency Nanotechnology Signature Initiative released in March 2016, the team will launch an ambitious effort to catalyze several interrelated, game-changing research activities for substantially increasing water availability at lower cost. The effort will position NC State, RTI, and partnering institutions including Duke and UNC-CH as a leading team at the water-nano nexus.
More information about the GRIP and other awardees can be found in the NC State press release and on the GRIP website.
Analytical Instrumentation Facility Announces Best Paper Awards
The 2016 Awards for “Best Papers” utilizing the Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF) were announced in November and went to Yanqi Ye from the group of Zhen Gu (BME) for a publication in Advanced Materials introducing a microneedle-based cell therapy and Kelly Stano from the group of Philip Bradford (TECS) for work published in Small on nanotube networks. Congratulations to these authors on their excellent work! Previous award winners can be found here.
Berube at the SNO annual meeting
David Berube attended the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization (SNO) (http://www.susnano.org/) annual meeting in Orlando, Florida on October 10-12, 2016. He delivered a paper as the first speaker of the first panel on November 10, 2016, and spoke about “Reframing Nanotechnology” where he made a case for marketing science in the upcoming decade to meet the contextual interests of both the new administration and the public at large.
AIF Seeking Qualified Business Services Coordinator
The Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF) at NC State seeks a talented individual to join our team as a Business Services Coordinator. The Business Services Coordinator oversees the business and financial management of a complex and evolving Service Center within the College of Engineering. This individual performs a range of responsibilities in areas including Business Administration, Financial Management, Information Analysis and Decision Making, Communication, and Human Resources. Most notably, the individual analyzes and evaluates facility operations and data and is empowered to make decisions to increase efficiency. The individual also manages one Administrative Support Specialist position in the unit. More details are available in the job description posted on the website: http://jobs.ncsu.edu/postings/76885.
The AIF is NC State’s primary shared facility for materials characterization with a mission to enable and lead state-of-the-art research through acquisition, development, maintenance, training, and access to major analytical and materials characterization instrumentation. Through the support of engaged faculty and experienced staff, the AIF supports state-of-the-art scanning and transmission electron microscopes, X-ray scattering and spectroscopy instruments, mass spectrometry, scanning probe microscopy, nanoindentation, and extensive sample preparation facilities.
Questions about the position can be directed to aif-contact@ncsu.edu.