Heraclitus, a 6th century BC Greek philosopher, once said, "There is nothing permanent except change." A change in the academic landscape took place in early June 2009 when the New York State Education Department approved a comprehensive baccalaureate program in Nanoscale Science at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany. Read full article
Daniel R. Smith, CNSE Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and CNSE Director of Student Services
August 31, 2009
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Did you know there are over 1,000 Nanotechnology-enabled consumer products on the market today? These tiny particles are in everything from non-stick cookware to the more unique items such as wearable sensors that monitor posture.
Melissa Preston, CNSE staff
August 26, 2009
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Researchers have discovered how to get engineering "DNA orgami" to self-organize on silicon. These shapes can be used to enhance production of circuits for next-generation chips.
Kristin Wolf, CNSE staff
August 17, 2009
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During the last week of my internship at CNSE, I was working on the results of my project, which turned out to be good results.
This summer internship meant a challenge for me, but I am very pleased with my work because I did my best and learned so much. This experience was so great and I will never forget that I participated in the 2009 CNSE Summer Internship Program.
Thank you so much CNSE for everything!
Daniel Aguilar, CNSE Intern
August 7, 2009
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This is my last blog of the summer but will not be the last time you hear of me. The CNSE summer internship program exceeded what expected from a summer internship program. I learned many life skills, including research skills, that I can apply to the real world. At the beginning of the summer, I was worried that I would not accomplish much because I didn't know anything about my topic. Throughout the summer I read and learned a lot and all of it helped to shape me into a better scientist/person.
Thank you CNSE for this experience.
Carl Irani, CNSE Intern
August 7, 2009
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Together with UAlbany's Life Sciences department, my team of researchers is electrospinning nanofibers into biodegradable scaffolds for in vitro salivary gland production. Our group hopes to prove that nanofibers provide an advantageous environment for cell proliferation as compared to flat polymer surfaces.
Since I last posted, my mentor and I have spent a lot of time perfecting our protocol for testing the adhesion of nanofibers to their glass coverslips. Without the adhesion protocol, imaging cells on the fibers would be impossible. Now that we've perfected our methods for treating our coverslips with silane, we are working to improve spinning parameters like spin time and cover slip arrangement in order to promote smaller gap sizes between spun fibers. This way, cells don't "see" glass because they remain suspended on the fiber mat.
We've actually made a lot of progress in the past few weeks; our colleagues at Life Sciences have let us know that they're ready to grow cells on our scaffolds once we produce enough for the first round of testing.
Mike Melfi, CNSE Intern
August 7, 2009
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Over the course of the 8 weeks in my CNSE internship, I have been working on EUV ROX. While we are waiting to receive our designed parts to assemble, mount, and test them in our vacuum chamber, I am working on our MATLAB program. From the NIST website, depending on our resist composition, we obtained a list of 15 species that might be outgassed during our experiments. However, we have to perform a calibration test that will adjust the species' sensitivities to our mass spectrometer standard instead of the NIST standards. Once the sensitivities have been corrected, the script will be modified to determine which of the 15 species are present. The program will output datasheets containing information about the type and the percentage of the outgassed molecules. The percentages are calculated so that the error between the modeled and the real data is minimized.
Steve Kana Mbazo, CNSE Intern
August 5, 2009
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A few more days and my summer internship will be over. Through this internship, I have learned and enjoyed many experiences!
At the beginning I thought that I would not be able to do some of the things by myself, but now I realize that I have greatly improved my lab skills. Last week, for example, I ran a column to purify one of my compounds by myself. I am also excited because some EUV lithography tests were performed using the acid amplifiers that I synthesized during the internship. I am also still working on computer modeling and now I find that the simulations make more sense. Getting good results is rewarding!
There is still a lot more for me to learn, but this experience has taught me a lot and helped me to improve my skills.
Sara Olivia Cruz Mateos, CNSE Intern
August 4, 2009
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