Nie, a chemist by training, is an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering a joint department operated by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Emory University and director of cancer nanotechnology at Emory's Winship Cancer Institute.
His research focuses on the field of nanotechnolgy, in which scientists build devices and materials one atom or molecule at a time, creating structures that take on new properties by virtue of their miniature size. The basic building block of nanotechnology is a nanoparticle, and a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Nanoparticles take on special properties because of their small size. For example, if you break a piece of candy into two pieces, each piece will still be sweet, but if you continue to break the candy until you reach the nanometer scale, the smaller pieces will taste completely different and have different properties.
Until recently, nanotechnology was primarily based in electronics, manufacturing, supercomputers and data storage. However Nie predicted years ago in a paper published in Science that the first major breakthroughs in the field will be in biomedical applications, such as early disease detection, imaging and drug delivery.
"Electronics may be the field most likely to derive the greatest economic benefit from nanotechnology," Nie said. "However, much of the benefit is unlikely to occur for another 10 to 20 years, whereas the biomedical applications of nanotechnology
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Contact: Larry Bowie
larry.bowie@icpa.gatech.edu
404-894-6016
Georgia Institute of Technology Research News
23-Oct-2002