Last August, Supratik Guha joined the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory as director for both the Center for Nanoscale Materials and the laboratory’s Nanoscience & Technology Division. He is also a professor at the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.
Guha took the time to answer a few questions about his background, his plan for the labs, and his perspective on where nanoscience is headed.
Q: What’s your professional background?
Guha: I’m a materials scientist by training. I’ve been at industrial labs—IBM and 3M—for the past 20-plus years. In my last job, I was director of physical sciences at IBM, where I was responsible for IBM’s worldwide strategy in physical sciences, so a lot of my job was taking fundamental science and moving it along towards practical applications.
What do you see as some of the grand challenges in nanosciences?
One which is well-known is the energy challenge—for instance, a way to make a really cheap solar cell that can beat conventional electricity costs—and then be able to store that energy.
Another is the computational challenge—efficient computing. Can we increase the energy efficiency of our computers by a factor of a thousand? A lot of the computing workloads today are not optimal for the way computers are designed. The basic design of the computer has not changed in 60-70 years; all the benefits you’ve seen have come from making devices smaller, faster and cheaper.
A third one is sensors and the Internet of Things. I think this entire area has room for improvement because the sensors are not good enough, not cheap enough, not energy efficient enough; and I think that’s where, again, nanosciences and materials sciences can play a huge role.
Nanoscience as we know it has been around for 20-25 years. I think of that as phase one, and phase two, which is happening now, is where we begin using what we have learned to make useful things that affect the public good.
What role do you see for Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials and the Nanoscience and Technology Division?
The CNM’s role is a dual one: to continue to do world class fundamental science and to be a leading edge user facility for research in nanomaterials. We will continue to look at emerging areas of science. Some are areas like quantum sensing, where you can make very sensitive detectors; new computational materials science techniques that incorporate machine learning approaches; and I think there’s a lot of room for research in the bio-nano space. These are just some examples, and CNM will continue to push into these new areas where we anticipate getting new users.
And the NST’s role is to take some of these basic science approaches and try to develop new technologies out of them. We hope to work closely with Nano Design Works and with the lab’s Technology Development & Commercialization division to be able to take the fundamental science coming out of CNM and translate it into technology. Doing fundamental science and making things for the public good don’t have to be exclusive. I believe in that. Any good lab has to have both.
How do you see your role at Argonne and how does your experience at IBM play into that?
My role is to make sure that we keep our research focus on relevant and emerging areas of nanoscience, that we continue to do leading work in these areas, and are able to continue to be an attractive “watering-hole” for users who come here for the first rate facilities and the abilities that our scientists bring to the table. Regarding my experience at IBM, it has been in the area of how one strategizes and executes in the space that is the intersection of science and technology.
The first thing I would say is that when you develop technology, you can’t just focus on the one reason why something’s going to work: you have to focus on the seven reasons it’s not going to work, right? Once you start focusing on that, everything else falls into place. I had a colleague I learned a lot from who used to say: “Tell me the bad news, because good news takes care of itself.”
What are some of your short and long term goals here?The people are really good here in CNM. I’ve been very impressed. My colleagues who have come to visit are also really impressed. And a lot are early- or mid-career scientists, so one of my goals is to mentor them, make them realize their ambitions, and help them set high-risk but high-payoff scientific goals. I believe as a basic science place we ought to have high-risk, high-payoff goals. We need to make sure that we continue to have world-class, state-of-the-art tools, which means that today we need to start thinking about what the users are going to need 3-5 years from now.
Any collaborations you’re looking to increase around the lab?
I think if you look at our collaborations, two things stand out. One is that industry collaborations are five percent or less of our total number of partnerships. This is true by and large of the nanocenters. I think we should try to increase industry collaboration. And the second thing we’d like to increase is the user base across the nation and across the world. Right now there is a large Illinois base, which is great, but we want to expand that pool as well.
What makes the nanocenters special, in your opinion?I think these nanocenters have today proved themselves and justified the investment and faith placed in them. They’re well-distributed geographically; I think it’s a wonderful concept that’s working very well. If there’s one thing I would change, it’s that not too many people know about them, particularly in industry, and that’s one thing we’re working at rectifying.
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