Chemistry,
but Make it Small How nanoscience transformed Northwestern. WRITTEN BY ELISSA GRAY, DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER and EMMA KUMER
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n the blitz of North Campus, Ryan Hall would hardly stand out if it weren’t for the picture of Nobel Prize winner Sir Fraser Stoddart pasted onto the front door. Inside this tan building, between the endless rows of windows, Northwestern is leading the way in nanoscience – the study of the miniscule. One of the many scientists involved in the charge is Chad Mirkin, who directs the International Institute of Nanotechnology (IIN), a collaboration between some 240 experts with backgrounds from biology and engineering to physics and business. Despite the frenetic activity of his lab, Mirkin is surprisingly relaxed: he’s wearing a Blackhawks quarter-zip and jokes between questions about his desire to gamble in Las Vegas. Today, Mirkin is showing me a nanoscale printer, a project he’s been working on since 1999, the year before he founded the IIN. It’s made up of thousands of tiny pens working in unison, so miniature that Mirkin keeps a macroscopic
model of it on his coffee table. But calling them pens is a mistake. They’re actually atomic force microscopes – AFMs for short – and they work on any surface, not just paper. This is all happening on the nanoscale, too, making the AFM the world’s smallest writing instrument. When they work in “I want to do unison, like in Mirkin’s everything 3D printer, they can even I possibly create tiny circuits for can to not electronics. Mirkin says just make his invention will have chemistry applications in any sector, great, but from medicine to optics. to make Behind his nanoscale the whole University printer are shelves of great.” awards, plaques and other accolades. But his work, whether in nanolithography or developing microtools to treat conditions like brain cancer, is about more than recognition. “I want to do everything I possibly can to not just make chemistry great, but to make the whole University great,” Mirkin says. “I bleed purple.”
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