M. Fatih Yegul (University of Waterloo) sent me info. about  his latest paper titled: “Nanotechnology: Canada’s Position in Scientific Publications and Patents” in answer to my question about numbers of articles published by Canadian researchers (as per my June 12 posting about the June 2008 editorial in Nature Nanotechnology’s analysis of various countries). He’ll be presenting his paper at the PICMET ’08 Conference in South Africa (website is www.picmet.org or click here) which will be published in the proceedings afterwards.

Yegul provides a very nice description of nanotechnology and its brief history and summarizes some of the policy issues succinctly. His quotes from multiple sources pointing out that Canada lacks a national nanotech strategy or coordination of effort confirmed my dawning suspicions. (I’ve been trying to find something definitive about Canadian nano for the last 1.5 years but most of the material is out of date and scattered wildly over various websites.)

I’ll talk about the numbers (some of them) tomorrow as Yegul has sliced and diced through a number of studies about published articles and patents and as you’d expect there are competing methodologies and acronyms that are unfamiliar to me.

Meanwhile, there was an announcement about Martha Cook Piper’s appointment to the Board of Trustees of the [Canada] National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) in April 2008 (see here).  Strangely, she’s not listed on the NINT website. You can find her predecessor, Preston Manning still listed (here), but no Martha. In fact, if you visit the website newsroom (here), you’ll find there’s no mention of her appointment or news of any kind since Sept. 2007. Hmmm….