Danil is a semiconductor technician at Intel, where he plays a key role in manufacturing cutting-edge chips. After transitioning from concierge work, Danil pursued community college training that prepared him for the demands of the semiconductor industry. He shares the importance of precision, collaboration, and the global impact of his work in advancing technology.
Show Notes
Danil works as a technician at Intel outside Portland, OR. He went to community college, and landed a job as a technician with a hi-tech company. Hear how Danil went from working as a concierge to working as a technician in one of the most high-tech companies in the world.
The Talking Technicians podcast is produced by MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center, through financial support from the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education grant program.
Opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.
Join the conversation. If you are a working technician or know someone who is, reach out to us at info@talkingtechnicians.org.
Leading Fortune 500 companies have improved employee retention by as much as 75 percent through mentoring initiatives. A recent MentorcliQ (a mentoring software company) study found that becoming more involved in mentoring as mentors or sponsors, leads to a culture of learning, development, and camaraderie.
Mentor-Connect (M-C) is a free service to help two-year college STEM faculty prepare competitive grant proposals for submission to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program.
Since its 2012 launch, 141 ATE proposals have been submitted from 164 colleges that have participated in the first eight cohorts (86% submission rate). Overall,160 two-year technical colleges have been served by the Mentor-Connect New-to-ATE project with 41 states reached as well as Puerto Rico and American Samoa (US territories) with Cohorts 1 through 9.
During the MNT-EC seminar series, Mel Cossette, Greg Kepner, and Elaine Craft discussed what Mentor-Connect is, how they are working with the Micro Nano Technology Education Center (MNT-EC) and how they guide faculty from two year institutions to write an NSF proposal for the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) directorate that focuses on technician education.
According to the M-C website section, Get A Mentor, Mentor-Connect offers three types of no-cost mentoring to community colleges seeking to improve technician and related STEM education through projects funded by NSF ATE. Online applications are available on site.
New-to-ATE (Deadline: October 8, 2021). This mentor program helps colleges develop grant proposals for the Small Grants for Institutions New to ATE track. (Colleges are considered new to ATE if they have not received ATE funding in the past seven years.)
Second-Chance (Deadline: April 1, 2021). Mentor-Connect invites colleges interested in reworking and resubmitting New-to-ATE proposals that were initially declined when submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to apply for Second-Chance Mentoring. Eligible colleges include:
(1) those whose first proposal to the Small Grants for Institutions New to ATE was declined, and
(2) those who successfully completed a Small Grants for Institutions New to ATE project and subsequently submitted a proposal for a full ATE Project that was declined.
Moving-Up (Deadline: April 1, 2021) is focused on helping colleges that received funding in the Small Grants for Institutions New to ATE track to develop larger ATE Project proposals.
In the Find A Grant Resource section, prospective grant recipients will find a range of excellent guides to help them navigate the world of NSF grant funding. In the Resource Library, there is a recent list of downloadable videos in their Coffee Break Webinar Series that are worth a look. Some of the videos are also found on the Mentor-Connect YouTube channel which is packed with information and tutorials about how to get started with NSF ATE grants.
Like the best Fortune 500 companies found in their mentoring programs, Mentor-Connect also has been instrumental in building mentoring culture and success in community college faculty. The trends are clear: Mentoring programs keep people engaged, productive, and resilient.
The Mentor-Connect project is funded through the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education program and formed out of Florence-Darlington Technical College’s South Carolina Advanced Technological Education Center of Excellence (SC ATE): National Resource Center in Florence, SC. DUE #1501183 & #1840856 Mentor-Connect: A Leadership Development and Outreach Initiative for ATE.
A Quick Definition of Nanotechnology and Nanoscience
Nanos is the Greek term for Dwarf. Walt Disney could have given the nanotechnology industry a kickstart back in 1937 if he only titled his classic movie Snow White and the Seven Nanos instead of Seven Dwarfs. Maybe not, but nano is definitely smaller than any dwarf you have ever seen on the big screen.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)scientist uses a Compound Semiconductor Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) System to grow semiconductor samples in the Semiconductor Growth lab at the Solar Energy Research Facility at NREL. MBE systems are considered a fundamental tool for developing nanotechnologies. Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash.
Nanotechnology is widely considered to be the field of applied science and technology where the control of matter on the molecular level occurs, smaller than 1 micrometer, but usually 1 to 100 nanometers (see How Big Is A Nanometer below), and the creation of devices within that size range. Although natural nanomaterials are all around us, nanotechnology is typically focused on and composed of human-made nanomaterials that occur from objects or processes created by people.
Micro Nano Tech Education Center (MNT-EC) Center Manager, Billie Copley, simplifies the above definition: “Nanoscience, generally speaking, is the observation, study and manipulation of matter on the atomic and molecular level. Nanotechnology uses the data gathered by nanoscience to improve or develop new materials and techniques.”
It is a multidisciplinary field, drawing from diverse areas of science and technology from applied physics to materials science; colloidal science to mechanical and electrical engineering, to name a few. These scientific areas are also leveraging a new generation of analytical tools such as the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to take nanotechnology even further.
How Big Is A Nanometer, Actually?
Most sites try to define nanotechnology by sharing sizes that our brains can barely imagine. Nano means one-billionth — a billionth of one meter is one nanometer. We cannot see nano without the aid of a powerful microscope, like a super powerful microscope. The Micro Nano Technology Education Center (MNT-EC) website launched last week with a post about Biomedical Research that our colleague, Dr. Neda Habibi, at Northwest Vista College, is providing students with research opportunities using microscopes that are powerful like the Hubble Space Telescope, if you could flip the Hubble into atomic mode.
To help people with size, nanotechnology sites often state that a human hair is 80,000 nm wide. Nanotechnology lives and works in sizes below 100 nm. To put that human hair scale in another context, “the comparative size of a nanometer to a meter is the same as that of a marble to the size of the earth” according to National Geographic.
The magazine offers an encyclopedia, of sorts, and within it is the Nanotechnology section for grades 9 through 12-plus. They share some additional concepts that probably will not help you visualize how small a nanometer is, but may help you mentally wrestle with just how tiny it is:
Your fingernails grow about one nanometer every second.
When a seagull lands on an aircraft carrier, it sinks about one nanometer.
A man’s beard grows about a nanometer between the time he picks up a razor and lifts it to his face.
One of the best explorations attempting to define nanotechnology comes from WIRED magazine’s YouTube channel on October 8, 2020 (see below). They asked an expert nanotechnology researcher at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center (IBM Research), Dr. George S. Tulevski, to explain the concept of nanotechnology to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. In this 24-minute video, viewers receive far more than definitions, but listen in on increasingly detailed and in-depth conversations of what nanotechnology is and can be in the future.
Watch:
Stay tuned as we will continue to update and provide resources at this “What Is Nanotechnology?” post.
Most people have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope. Now flip that idea and direct it at the atomic level. In a new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, principal investigator, Dr. Neda Habibi and students from Northwest Vista College in collaboration with the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) will have an opportunity to use advanced and powerful electron microscopes for undergraduate research projects.
Transmission electron microscope at Sandia National Laboratory’s (CINT) Center for Integrated Nanotechnology. Photographer Donica Payne. Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash
The Biomedical Engineering (BME) project involves working with biomedical devices, cell culturing and microscopy techniques. The research projects will involve creating new types of anti-cancer drugs and tissue scaffolds for combating cancer and improving tissue regeneration. The set of techniques skills that students will receive will be cell culturing, electrospinning, working with advanced nano and micro characterization techniques such as FESEM, and TEM (see “Getting Technical” below).
Extending the success of an existing NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant, the Alamo Institute for Materials Technology (AIM-TEC) at Northwest Vista College will receive additional funding to continue building workforce opportunities for Alamo college district students.
In the original NSF ATE grant, Northwest Vista College professors created AIM-TEC to create a self-sustaining and replicable regional workforce model that leverages local resources and partnerships to address the critical need by industry for quality technician education and training in advanced materials technology. This new BME project will place students in research projects at two main locations, Biomedical Engineering Department at UTSA and Tower Semiconductor.
The results of the research project will help students to locate in a workplace research facility or transition and continue with higher education into BME undergraduate programs. The project aims to recruit students from minority, unrepresented and female students to participate in the research experience. Thanks to participation within the Micro Nano Technology Education Center and mentorship from MNT-EC Center Director, Dr. Jared Ashcroft, this new project is giving students around the USA more opportunities to explore the micro nano technology industry.
Getting Technical: FESEM: Field emission scanning electron microscopy can magnify at ranges of small (10x) up to massive (300,000x), with incredible depth of field. FESEM is a more advanced SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) that uses a focused beam of electrons to create an image. As the electrons interact, they produce a signal rich with information about the surface (topography) and makeup or composition of that sample. FESEM microscopes are capable of scanning down to 1.5 nanometers (nm), with less distortion and better resolution.
TEM: Transmission electron microscopy is another analysis technique using an electron beam to transmit through a specimen to form an image. Similar to FESEM, this method also captures how electrons interact, magnify it onto a screen, film, or increasingly with image sensors.
Hat tip to Vac Coat Ltd for its explanation of FE-SEM as well as to various Wikipedia pages across the history of microscopes.
Vitaliy, a technician at ARC Nano in Minnesota, specializes in precision nanotechnology applications. Originally from Ukraine, he shares how immigrating to the U.S. and attending community college shaped his career path. This episode highlights his role in creating cutting-edge solutions for industries like healthcare and energy, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and skill-building in technical fields.
Show Notes
Vitaly works as a technician at ARC Nano in Minnesota. He emigrated from the Ukraine, went to community college, and landed a job as a technician with a hi-tech company. Now he’s working on an engineering degree to expand his job opportunities.
The Talking Technicians podcast is produced by MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center, through financial support from the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education grant program.
Opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.
Join the conversation. If you are a working technician or know someone who is, reach out to us at info@talkingtechnicians.org.
