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Broad
Collaborations on Small-Scale Research
By Barbara Spector
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Naomi
J. Halas,
M.A. ’84, Ph.D.’86
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When Naomi J. Halas graduated
from Philadelphia’s LaSalle College in 1980
with a B.A. degree in chemistry, she faced a quandary.
She had developed an interest in physics and hoped
to pursue graduate studies in that field. But
physics departments in traditional graduate schools
wouldn’t accept a student who lacked an undergraduate
physics degree.
At Bryn Mawr College, she
found a graduate program that fit her needs. With
the faculty’s blessing, she combined the
graduate and undergraduate courses she needed
to develop an expertise in physics. "With
its size, Bryn Mawr has a great deal of flexibility,"
says Halas, who earned an M.A. (1984) and a Ph.D.
(1986) in physics from Bryn Mawr under Alfonso
M. Albano, Marion Reilly Professor of Physics,
and former physics professor Neal B. Abraham.
Today, she is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in
Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University
in Houston.
Halas says her Bryn Mawr experience
provided her with a "very balanced and broad
background" that has helped her to collaborate
across disciplines. That interdisciplinary expertise
— further refined during a graduate research
fellowship at the IBM research center in Yorktown,
N.Y., and a postdoctoral fellowship at the former
AT&T Bell Laboratories — contributed
to her rise from a new Ph.D. to the holder of
a named full professorship in just 14 years.
Ultra-Small
Materials
Halas’ research involves
constructing new materials on the nanometer scale
— one-billionth of a meter — and studying
their physical properties via scanning tunneling
microscopy and ultrafast laser spectroscopy. Her
work now encompasses elements of physics, optics,
chemistry, engineering and materials science.
Halas’ research moved
into the realm of nanoengineering in 1997, when
she published a paper on the optical properties
of a new type of nanoparticle, known as metal
nanoshells. In 1998, her research group developed
a method of fabricating these particles. Her team
uses chemistry to construct the nanoshells, then
studies their electronic, optical and transport
properties and the macroscopic materials that
can be made from them.
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(From left) Kelley Bradley, Sarah Westcott, Naomi Halas and Joseph Jackson
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Nanoshells are layered nanoparticles
consisting of an insulating core coated by a thin
shell of gold in a configuration that Halas’
team likens to malted milk balls. By varying the
dimensions of the core and shell, they can create
nanoshells that absorb or scatter light across
a very large range of wavelengths, both visible
and infrared. "No other nanoparticle has
these properties," Halas says.
Big Applications
Three features make nanoshells
unique, Halas explains: They are biocompatible,
they absorb light in the region of the spectrum
where the body is most transparent and they’re
extremely small — about 100 nanometers in
diameter, roughly one one-hundredth the size of
a cell — enabling many of them to be attached
to a cell in the body.
Halas and colleagues have
been studying the applications of nanoshells in
cancer treatment, medical testing and drug delivery.
The particles can be tagged to target cancer cells
and then irradiated with infrared light, which
kills the tumor cells but leaves normal cells
undisturbed. The biosensing capabilities of nanoshells
also can be used to develop rapid diagnostics.
In addition, when a nanoshell is combined with
a polymer and heated with near-infrared light,
it can be used to deliver a controlled amount
of a drug to the body, overcoming a deficiency
of other drug-delivery devices, which cannot control
the amount of drug released. Nanoshells have potential
applications in fields other than medicine. Cosmetics
firms, for example, have expressed interest in
licensing the technology to develop new dyes and
pigments that won’t harm the body.
Halas investigates nanoshells’
bioengineering applications in collaboration with
Jennifer West, associate professor of bioengineering
at Rice. "All of the bioengineering ideas
we’re working on came out of one conversation
that she and I had in 1998," Halas marvels.
"She and I both found it very surprising
that in a very male-dominated field, here we are
— two women working together." The two
researchers are co-advisers to several graduate
students who are focusing on this topic. The nanoshell
research has been funded by multimillion dollar
grants from the National Science Foundation, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
the U.S. Army, the Office of Naval Research and
the Robert A. Welch Foundation.
Balancing
Commerce and Education
Recently, Halas and West have
been exploring the commercial potential of nanoshells,
which were cited in Business Week’s
"Developments to Watch" section in 1999.
The two scientists are co-founders of a company
called Nanospectra, which was formed with the
help of Rice University’s technology transfer
department and incorporated in January 2001. Rice
is an equity partner in the fledgling firm, which
recently received a Small Business Innovation
Research grant from NSF. A third principal in
the company who has worked with other start-up
firms is handling the business side of Nanospectra’s
operations, Halas says. "Jennifer West and
I are the technical people who advise and help
the company to grow," she notes.
Halas intends to limit her
role in the company to that of a scientific consultant
and focus on her primary responsibilities as a
researcher, teacher and mentor. "If I wanted
to go into business, I would have done it 20 years
ago," notes Halas, who teaches every semester
in addition to overseeing an active research group.
Research
and Teaching Come First
With increasing peer and institutional
pressure to develop entrepreneurial ventures based
on scientific discoveries, it’s crucial to
ensure that educational and commercial efforts
are kept separate, Halas stresses. "That’s
a really important issue — an issue that
won’t go away. It’s a priority in my
mind to keep those areas distinct." But the
need for such divisions isn’t unprecedented,
she adds. "You could say there’s also
a barrier between education and research,"
she notes. "That’s a traditional barrier
that we’ve always had."
Halas has supervised graduate
students in six different departments —
physics, chemistry, applied physics, materials
science, chemical engineering and bioengineering.
While the interdisciplinary nature of her lab
forces her to be conscientious in helping her
students meet their diverse requirements, it offers
an exciting atmosphere for the young researchers;
"Certainly, they’ve told me so,"
she notes.
Such collaborations have helped
her former students find positions in highly competitive
fields. Their careers have run the gamut of scientific
inquiry; her protégés are now working
in academia, industry and national laboratories.
"It’s a very important challenge these
days to find young, trained scientists and engineers
who know how to talk to people in disciplines
other than their own," Halas notes.
How to
Succeed in Grad School
Halas, who returned to Bryn
Mawr last November to deliver a presentation on
nanoshells’ properties and applications,
wrote a widely quoted article on "Seven Steps
to Success in Graduate School (and Beyond)"
— a list of essential skills that successful
researchers have developed. The seven steps are:
Work (learn to debug theories and solve
problems), Think (understand, explain and
interpret your results), Read (fully investigate
your area in addition to learning about other
fields), Write (technical papers, a thesis,
proposals), Speak (learn how to present
your work to an audience), Manage (learn
to manage your time, foster good relationships
with your collaborators and develop a research
program rather than a series of disconnected projects),
and Contemplate (search for connections
between ideas).
"I came up with that
list by looking at other people in the course
of their careers," Halas says. "All
of us in education are perpetual students. The
skills we acquire in graduate school we end up
refining, deepening and broadening throughout
our lives. These are lifelong disciplines."
When she’s not in the
lab or the classroom, Halas relaxes with her husband,
Peter Nordlander (also a physics professor at
Rice), at their 350-acre ranch in South Texas.
The couple, who have owned the ranch for five
years, are working to develop the diversity of
the vegetation and animal life on the property,
including more than 75 species of birds as well
as bobcats, mountain lions and deer. "I’ve
always had a tremendous interest in nature,"
she says. "That’s not something you
pursue in an urban environment, but Texas is much
more of an outdoor place."
The ranch is a weekend retreat
for the two professors. But it’s also a productive
place to work, Halas says. "I actually get
a lot of work done there because I don’t
have interruptions."
About the Author
Barbara Spector writes on
science and technology as well as business topics.
She is the executive editor of Family Business
magazine and former editor of The Scientist.
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