Connecting the Dots of my Career (Part 4)

Here I write about my time in Sweden and how it has led me to my present position and thoughts. I start with an account of how it came to be. (That’s actually a picture of Copenhagen, Denmark in the summertime.)

In the fall of my final year, I phone-interviewed for a postdoctoral researcher position in a European project called Nanommune, which was investigating the toxicity and risks of engineered nanoparticles. Professor Maria Strømme’s group at Uppsala University was contributing mesoporous silica to the studies, and the different functionalizations had to be thoroughly characterized, in both dry and dispersed forms, to correlate observed biological effects to the particles’ properties.

Looking back at my notes of the interview, one thing I said was

I got into doing research because I like generating new ideas, understanding why they worked, and want these ideas to change the world for the better. By doing a postdoc like this, then later when I am in an industrial setting, the knowledge of these materials’ health impact as they go in new products would be invaluable.

Do I still believe this today? I’ll answer that before this post is finished.

I was offered the job. Before I made a decision, I visited Uppsala and came back with very positive feelings of the people in Maria’s group and the Uppsala-Stockholm area. What about the work itself? In Part 3 I wrote about the ES&H constraints we faced at Sandia, stemming from a lack of health-risk data on nanomaterials. And now I was being offered a chance to contribute to research in this area? Yes, sign me up!

My first work activity was the annual meeting in Scotland, with presentations from all the different work packages. I hadn’t given much thought to biology in my nanomaterials PhD but I was able to follow the discussions of our collaborators’ in vitro work thanks to the tissue engineering course I took in college along with the lab component in which we did cell experiments, including tagging and imaging them.

My work with silica led me to learn new techniques, sol gel synthesis and surfactant-based templating. The particle analysis was comprehensive, using techniques I was well versed in, such as DLS and zeta potential measurement, and others that I learned as I did, such as BET gas adsorption isotherm for surface area and porosity. Outside of the lab, interactions with my colleagues on the biology side of the project inspired further interest in how materials could be tailored for applications like drug delivery while minimizing adverse side effects.

Another reason that I accepted the Uppsala job was the encouragement of individual research interests. Having worked on carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide dispersions to wrap up my PhD, I was still thinking about carbon. Maria funded my travel for two very useful events: a workshop on nanocomposites in Lund, from which I continued over the Øresund to present my graphene oxide work at the very aptly named Carbonhagen 2010 conference.

The nanocomposites workshop, in particular, helped me see the academia-industry connections centered around carbon nanomaterials (CNMs) and the array of products being invented or optimized using CNMs. What I learned there along with what I’d been reading led to a convergence of thoughts around the idea of developing products based on dispersible graphene.

Around this time, IVA, the Royal Engineering Sciences Academy, put out a call for researchers who were interested in commercializing their work. If you were accepted, you got a pot of money and a mentor experienced in a technology business to accelerate your learning and testing.

I got an awesome mentor. He asked very incisive questions that helped me understand how graphene dispersions could be a platform technology, from which products could be offered as long as they created enough value for the  potential markets I identified. What I learned in this process helped cultivate graphene into my “20% time” project at Uppsala. I reached out to some researchers from the composites workshop who were looking at industrial applications and began to investigate chemical modifications of graphene based on some of the problems they cited with existing graphene products. The new synthesis method I developed in response yielded interesting products containing nitrogen groups, and these were characterized pretty comprehensively: by using AFM again, becoming more proficient at TGA, and teaching myself XPS, to name a few of the techniques. The real payoff was getting data from a collaborator showing my material outperform a commercial graphene product in a composite. (Look for the synthesis paper in a chemistry journal later this year.)

After Nanommune finished, I wanted to continue my work on CNMs. I landed at the University of Pittsburgh with a group who had partnered with Nanommune, and was investigating biodegradation of CNMs. Here I’m investigating the degradation of composites containing CNMs, while exploring nuances in the nitrogen content of doped CNMs through chemical assays. Alongside the experimental work, we’re writing a review article on the biological persistence and interactions of CNMs.

Recall the above question about my comment from the Uppsala interview. I totally embrace it today. Nanomaterials will improve many technologies, and consumers will compel us to prove that the materials don’t harm them. Having come down this path, immersing myself in nano-health-risk studies and gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges in using CNMs commercially, I’ve begun to envision my potential next step. I believe my knowledge can contribute to the development of actual products, not just published papers and patents. I think the following two areas are ones in which my understanding and skills may prove effective:

1. Skincare and cosmetics: (Nano)particles are already employed in this industry. They will have the ability to carry therapeutic agents across cell membranes, or be active themselves inside cells. What new restorative capabilities could they offer? How could they be engineered and then later formulated, with surfactants for example, to have maximum efficacy and minimum toxicity?
2. Industrial materials: composites, coatings, etc. Carbon nanotubes and graphene will be key players in this field. How can they be harnessed in ways that are compatible with existing capital equipment and manufacturing methods?

I’ve explored solutions to these questions and aim to validate them in a commercial setting.