| Professor Gordon Wallace (left) and Professor Will Price (right) pict... Professor Gordon Wallace (left) and Professor Will Price (right) pictured with two of the competition-winning students Nick Whiteside (second left) and Jared Barnes |
Student competition winners score places at Nanobionics Symposium
16 May 2008 | Bernie Goldie
Nanotechnology scientists of the future will make their presence felt at the forthcoming Asia-Pacific Symposium on Nanobionics to be held at UOW’s Innovation Campus following the successful running of a competition open to nanotechnology students.
The successful students will now obtain free registration to the international symposium running from June 22-25 which will also include them attending the Public Plenary Lecture to be presented by Professor Graeme Clark from the Bionic Ear Institute.
Executive Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, Professor Gordon Wallace, said in the emerging field of nanobionics it was important to identify and involve highly-talented students.
“We must develop their research skills so that they can contribute to areas critical to Australia’s needs. We are indeed fortunate to have UOW students of the calibre that participated in the recent nanotechnology competition,” Professor Wallace said.
Nanotechnology allows the investigation and mimicry of natural biological functions that occur on the nano-scale, and may improve or manipulate these functions by bridging the biology-electronics interface. The bionic ear is one successful application of nanobionics research.
The Head of the School of Chemistry, Professor Will Price, said students were asked to submit entries to the competition based on their opinions of what exactly was nanobionics and where would it be in 10 years’ time.
The winning students are Nick Whiteside (3rd year Bachelor of Nanotechnology [Advanced] degree), Jared Barnes (4th year Bachelor of Nanotechnology [Advanced] degree), Kathika Prasad (1st year Bachelor of Science (Nanotechnology), George Stanton (2nd year Bachelor of Nanotechnology [Advanced] degree), Geoffrey Pidcock (3rd year Bachelor of Nanotechnology [Advanced] degree and Cameron Ferris (4th year Bachelor of Nanotechnology [Advanced] degree.
Student responses to the questions ranged from how nanobionics represents a new scale in the interface between the synthetic and the natural and how generally it will play a pivotal role in the future of health and medical research.
As one student pointed out: “Nanobionics will enable anyone to go down to the local GP, where you can plug in and have your vital signs checked immediately and fine-tuned, become immunised for any new bad bugs through a download into your immune system and update to the latest version of smell-o-vision.
“Limbs which are lost will be replaced with biological prosthetics that connect straight up to existing muscle tissue. Using this biological-nanomaterial interface, they will be capable of every degree of freedom the original limb had, thanks to its multitude of carefully integrated artificial muscles working in symphony to reproduce the simple motions we take for granted.”
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