DCTC Pilots NanoProfessor

Nanoscience Technology program profiled in IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine

The Nanoscience Technology program at Dakota County Technical College was spotlighted in the June 2012 issue of IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Xplore Digital Library. In an article titled, “Closing the Nanotechnology Workforce Gap,” Dean Hart, the chief commercial officer for NanoInk, Inc., writes about how the NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program is helping solve a massive workforce shortfall confronting the nanotechnology industry.

Hart notes that the industry is looking at a “global demand of 6 million nanotechnology workers by 2020; however, only 400,000 nanotech workers are currently in the global workforce, and most of them are at the Ph.D. level conducting some form of research. For myriad of emerging nanotech companies to become commercially viable entities, they must find non-Ph.D. human capital. Few nanotech companies could sustain long-term commercial success if non Ph.D.-based human capital was unavailable.”

The DCTC Nanoscience Technology program, headed by Deb Newberry, took on the role of piloting NanoProfessor in 2010. NanoProfessor proved an instant success, providing in-depth experimental opportunities to students entering Newberry’s groundbreaking program.

Image courtesy of NanoInk, Inc., and IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine

“The NanoProfessor System has been used by faculty and college and high school students for defined experiments as well as independent research. It is an amazing set of equipment—it is hard to keep students away from it, and we have now set up additional lab time for students to use the equipment outside of the designated class time,” said Newberry, who also serves as the director of Nano-Link, a Midwest regional center whose primary mission is providing topical, modularized format nanoscience content for use by high school and college educators as well as by industry professionals.

To learn more about the wonders of nanotechnology, the educational benefits of NanoProfessor, and the leading-edge curriculum of the DCTC Nanoscience Technology program, please read Dean Hart’s entire article: “Closing the Nanotechnology Workforce Gap.”