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Himanshu_Gupta
When i joined Nanoscience and Nanotechnology program back in 2005, i had a ...
Nic_Mokhoff
prabhakar_deosthali: You make a good point. It's always wise to combine the old ...
Research orgs open nanotech health center
Nicolas Mokhoff
2/15/2011 5:00 PM EST
MANHASSET, NY -- Sematech, its subsidiary ISMI, and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany have created the NanoHealth and Safety Center (NSC), headquartered at CNSE’s Albany NanoTech Complex.
The center will be funded at least $10 million over the next five years and will address emerging occupational and environmental health and safety issues around nanotechnology.
The NSC will address four critical challenges: occupational health and safety including exposure to nanoparticles in the workplace; environmental health and safety, to assess the impact and life cycles of nanomaterials; resource utilization, to study decreasing water, energy and chemical usage while increasing efficiency; and proactive collaborative research and development, from new device materials and processing fluids to manufacturing processes and tools.
CNSE Associate Vice President and Director of the Systems Toxicology Laboratory professor Thomas Begley will serve as Director of the NSC.
Membership in the NSC is open to chipmakers, equipment and materials manufacturers, as well as other participants in the nanotechnology, biomedical, and defense industries.
"Understanding and addressing issues related to occupational and environmental health and safety are paramount to supporting and advancing nanoscale know-how that will revolutionize nearly every industry in the 21st century," said Alain Kaloyeros, Senior Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of CNSE, said in a statement. "The collaboration will ensure that human health and environmental safety are protected at the same time nanotechnology innovations continue to accelerate at an unprecedented pace."
The center is expected to catalyze the creation of more than 100 high-tech Environmental Health Safety jobs at the UAlbany NanoCollege, while offering access to hundreds of experts and leading-edge technologies in a first-of-its-kind effort to address emerging occupational and environmental health and safety issues in order to solve manufacturing problems, leverage resources, and reduce cost and risk.
The center will be funded at least $10 million over the next five years and will address emerging occupational and environmental health and safety issues around nanotechnology.
The NSC will address four critical challenges: occupational health and safety including exposure to nanoparticles in the workplace; environmental health and safety, to assess the impact and life cycles of nanomaterials; resource utilization, to study decreasing water, energy and chemical usage while increasing efficiency; and proactive collaborative research and development, from new device materials and processing fluids to manufacturing processes and tools.
CNSE Associate Vice President and Director of the Systems Toxicology Laboratory professor Thomas Begley will serve as Director of the NSC.
Membership in the NSC is open to chipmakers, equipment and materials manufacturers, as well as other participants in the nanotechnology, biomedical, and defense industries.
"Understanding and addressing issues related to occupational and environmental health and safety are paramount to supporting and advancing nanoscale know-how that will revolutionize nearly every industry in the 21st century," said Alain Kaloyeros, Senior Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of CNSE, said in a statement. "The collaboration will ensure that human health and environmental safety are protected at the same time nanotechnology innovations continue to accelerate at an unprecedented pace."
The center is expected to catalyze the creation of more than 100 high-tech Environmental Health Safety jobs at the UAlbany NanoCollege, while offering access to hundreds of experts and leading-edge technologies in a first-of-its-kind effort to address emerging occupational and environmental health and safety issues in order to solve manufacturing problems, leverage resources, and reduce cost and risk.
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prabhakar_deosthali
2/16/2011 1:03 PM EST
While this newly formed center will address the issues of effects of nano-particles on health, it may accidentally find some of the good things about these nano particles entering our skin or getting inhaled into our body. In ancient days wearing gold/silver ornaments on your body was treated as having some good effects on our health. May be some nano-particles of these metals must be doing something good to us. Similarly wearing a particular gem also must be having some nano-effect . This institute can do some research on this topic also to find a scientific basis for these old beliefs.
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Nic_Mokhoff
2/16/2011 1:51 PM EST
prabhakar_deosthali: You make a good point. It's always wise to combine the old with the new and reap from both. This center is mostly about covering all possible bases from detrimental effects in nano research. Studying the health and safety consequences is a good endeavor as long as it does not get in the way of progress. Some are calling for a new discipline: Nanotoxicology: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110202/Nanotechnology-and-nanotoxicology.aspx
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Himanshu_Gupta
2/16/2011 4:58 PM EST
When i joined Nanoscience and Nanotechnology program back in 2005, i had a seminar course. The main focus of the seminar was to discuss and listen to the experts in the field about the ethical and moral responsibility of the people working in this field. One of the topic, which used to pop-up time and again was health and safety. Hopefully the research done in CNSE center would allay some of the fears about nanosize material usage.
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