The MOtiF Materials team led by Elizabeth Rasmussen, a PhD student in the lab of NanoES faculty member Igor Novosselov, won the $15,000 grand prize at the 2019 Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge (EIC), an the event hosted by the UW Foster School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship. The team of mechanical engineering students aim to solve a battery manufacturing problem that “doesn’t involve killing our planet with toxic waste.”
The UW has deep roots in quantum research and discovery, and today researchers across the UW — in the College of Engineering, the College of Arts & Sciences and the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems — are at the forefront of QIS research. The university recently established UW Quantum X to join QIS research endeavors across the UW in fields such as quantum sensing, quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum materials and devices. Co-chairs of UW Quantum X are Kai-Mei Fu, associate professor of both physics and electrical and computer engineering and a NanoES faculty member, and Jim Pfaendtner, associate professor and chair of chemical engineering. Fu and Pfaendtner were also co-organizers of the summit, along with counterparts at Microsoft and the PNNL.
NanoES faculty member Eric Klavins and his team are engineering a toolbox of synthetic biological parts to create new living systems. The Klavins research group maintains lab and office space on the third floor of the NanoES building.
The University of Washington currently has an opening for the director of the Washington Nanofabrication Facility, a world-class facility in the NSF-supported National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure network. The WNF director will oversee all aspects of cleanroom operation and supervise a staff of more than 10 technical and administrative members.
NanoES is hosting Jim Heath, President of the Institute for Systems Biology, as the next NanoES Distinguished Practitioner. Dr. Heath will discuss new single cell methods for oncology and immuno-oncology.
“One of the really wonderful things about WNF is how it feels like a community,” says Andy Lingley, a nanofabrication engineer at Modern Electron, a cleantech startup located in Bellevue, Washington. The Washington Nanofabrication Facility (WNF) is a publicly accessible facility at the University of Washington (UW) and is part of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), a network of nanoscale research and development facilities funded by the National Science Foundation. Lingley joined the WNF community in 2007 when he was a new graduate student at UW, and he continued to work with WNF as his career progressed. Lingley offers a unique perspective of WNF as someone who has utilized its nanofabrication capabilities as an academic user, staff scientist, and industrial user.
Dr. Andy Lingley
Lingley first interacted with WNF while conducting research as a graduate student in the lab of electrical and computer engineering affiliate professor, now Amazon vice president, Babak Parviz. Lingley used WNF tools to fabricate contact lenses embedded with sensors or LEDs, which will be adapted for diabetic patients as a non-invasive glucose monitor. “WNF exposed me to a wide variety of microfabrication projects, including solar cells, flexible substrates for electronics, and neural electrodes — all of which require working with different materials and at different size scales,” Lingley recounted. “There was a lot of in-house expertise for each of these applications, and staff and other industrial users interacted with us [graduate students] constantly.”
After finishing his Ph.D. in 2012, Lingley jumped at the opportunity to join WNF full-time. “Almost immediately, I was responsible for several different functions of the cleanroom, including safety, lithography, and etching,” Lingley said. “Working as a staff scientist at WNF allowed me to see even further under the hood, and to understand the equipment and processes well enough to teach graduate students and industrial users.”
In 2015, Lingley started working for Modern Electron. This local startup has received over $10M in venture capital funding to develop advanced thermionic energy converters as cheaper, more reliable, and lightweight alternatives to conventional steam turbines. Thermionic converters capture heat in an “emitter” electrode, raising its temperature to over 1000°C. Hot electrons escape the emitter and flow across a microscale vacuum gap to a cooler “collector” electrode. These collected electrons have enough excess energy to do useful work as electricity in a circuit. As an industrial user, Lingley has used WNF equipment to prototype microstructured silicon electrodes to improve the electron collection process, which allows thermionic converters to surpass historical limitations.
Lingley credits the breadth of experience he gained at WNF for his ability to adapt to and succeed in a startup. “I was given the opportunity to get in on the ground floor with Modern Electron, which is an entirely different environment from performing research or operating the WNF clean room,” Lingley explained. “But, thanks to my time at WNF and my various roles, I came in with a thorough understanding of the semiconductor industry and the technical capabilities of the facility. This has really helped me drive progress at Modern Electron.”
A microstructured semiconductor fabricated at WNF for use in Modern Electron’s thermionic converters
Modern Electron’s technology is very promising, but as is the case for many small energy startups, they lacked the significant capital necessary to purchase their own advanced manufacturing facilities and equipment. WNF supports technology innovation and commercialization, for startups as well as larger and more established companies, by giving them access to specialized equipment and a highly trained workforce. Modern Electron uses a number of different WNF instruments such as a Canon Stepper for photolithography and a SPTS Rapier to etch small, deep holes in silicon wafers.
Modern Electron has also hired two students from the WNF Undergraduate Research Program, which Lingley says is a testament to the quality of students that come out of the program. “WNF has an exceptional cohort of undergraduate employees. It’s so helpful to have them around the lab — they make sure the lab is stocked and all of the equipment is running smoothly. And it’s a great opportunity for the students too, because they get to work on real-world projects and help develop new processes alongside staff scientists. It’s hands-on training to be an engineer.”
The next move for Modern Electron is toward a scaled-up, market-ready product. Even as the company transitions some of its manufacturing to external foundries, Lingley will continue to benefit from his relationship with WNF. “By interacting with other users, I’ve been exposed to the differences between academic and industrial cleanrooms. Scale-up is a fundamental step for a successful startup, and I’m excited to continue with this new challenge.”
We are thrilled to welcome Lucas Meza to UW as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and NanoES faculty member. The Mechanical Engineering department and NanoES partnered to help bring Meza to UW from the University of Cambridge where he was a research associate studying the micromechanical behavior of 3D woven fiber composites. At UW, Meza will investigate the connection between small-scale material phenomena and large-scale mechanical properties in natural and engineered materials with the specific goal of using nanoscale architecture as a design tool to create new materials with novel mechanical properties.
Peter Pauzauskie, Materials Science & Engineering professor and NanoES faculty member, synthesizes nanoscale materials for potential applications in next-generation quantum sensors, biomedical devices, and solid-state laser refrigeration. The Pauzauskie Research Group maintains office space, a wet lab for nanocrystal synthesis, and a lab for laser spectroscopy experiments in the NanoES building.
In a paper published Oct. 8 in the journal Nano Letters, a team from the University of Washington and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan announced that it has constructed functional metalenses that are one-tenth to one-half the thickness of the wavelengths of light that they focus. Their metalenses, which were constructed out of layered 2D materials, were as thin as 190 nanometers — less than 1/100,000ths of an inch thick.
The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Washington, Seattle invites applications for multiple full-time tenure-track positions with a nine-month service period annually, from exceptional candidates with strong record of collaboration and creativity. Hiring will be made primarily at the tenure-track assistant professor level with an anticipated start date of September 16, 2019. More information about the department, including background on our recent name change to ECE can be found at www.ece.uw.edu.
