Nanotechnology and Nano-biotech are now everywhere

Here I list some groupings which have been formed over the last few years. They are in various stages of devlopment; new people and old, new buildings and old, new ideas and old: definitely an exciting time to be around in a fast-developing field

a) European groups

• Mark Welland now heads an IRC (Interdisciplinary Research Group) based at Cambridge,UK involving co-workers at Bristol and UCL. But this long dramatis personae is just a small fraction of scientists, even at these three Universities, who can describe their work in terms of nanoscience or technology.
• A recently formed Nanoscience and Nanotechnology@Sussex grouping, is up and running, and includes many research activities across a wide range of Materials Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Engineering. An undergraduate degree is being launched this year, in addition to ongoing postgraduate training.
• In the UK, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle Universities, and a collaboration between UCL and ICL (London) also now have Nano-centers, some with a strong regional development orientation. This list is almost certainly not exhaustive, and they have all been started fairly recently. If you feel inspired, you can join the Institute of Nanotechnology, which has a six-year history, and maintains extensive pages of news and links.
• Visit Flemming Besenbacher's well-known CAMP STM Lab, at Aarhus University in Denmark, and you will find he is now the director of i-NANO, the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre. This also features new undergraduate courses, and if you speak Danish, you can "Login for studerende". Well, maybe, learing Danish wouldn't be so hard after all.
• The regrouped Institut de Physique des Nanostructures (IPN) at EPFL (Lausanne), Switzerland, contains well-known SPM-reseachers Harald Brune, Klaus Kern and others. Klaus is now mainly based at his Nanoscale Science Department at MPI-Stuttgart in Germany, while maintaining a smaller group led by Johnannes Barth at IPN-EPFL.

b) Groups in the USA

• Columbia University, New York City, and RPI, further up the Hudson river, are just two of several Universities awarded large NSF grants to study this area. The RPI Director, Dick Siegel, is one of the true pioneers of nanoscience and nanotechnolgy, having received awards for technology transfer using nanoscale materials, long before it was fashionable.
• IBM Yorktown Labs has also felt the need to rebrand Phaedon Avouris' impressive STM-based activities, which stretch back over the last 20 years at least.
• National Laboratories, such as Argonne (ANL) are also in on the act, with Sam Bader, a noted nanomagnetism researcher, as the scientific director.
• Since Google 'nanotechnology +USA' came back with 85,000 hits in 0.21 seconds today, you can imagine that I could keep going at this task for some time, and that you might get there faster if you have a need to know. Or you could investigate a conference, such as Nanotech 2003, Computational Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. But beware, some conferences look distinctly strange, some of them are aimed at venture capitalists, and several are very expensive.
• If you feel it is mostly about money anyway, why not read up about it at the government's National Nanotechnology Initiative site? Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say. Actually, it is not just about money, but is largely about coordination of effort, and interfacing with the 'real-world'. And a lot of that is down to my long-time friend and one-time Illinois colleague Dick Siegel. Hi Dick, and "good luck" with your latest venture!