Tag Archives: NANOEDUCATOR

RUSTEC holds an international education conference

November 15-19, 2o10 will see Arizona State University hosting NT-MDT and RUSTEC’s (Russian Technology Science and Education Consortia) first international workshop. I mentioned (in my June 30, 2010 posting about nanoeducation in Colombia, Russia, and Iral) NT-MDT and RUSTEC in the context of their May 2010 nanoeducation conference held in Russia at the Kurchatov Institute.

From the latest news item about NT-MDT and RUSTEC on Nanowerk,

NT-MDT Co. and the first international workshop of RUSTEC, the USA NT-MDT Co. will be sponsor and the official partner of the first international workshop of Russian Science Technology and Educational Consortia (RUSTEC) at Arizona State University (ASU), the USA.

Director-General of the NT-MDT Co. Viktor Bykov will chair the workshop together with Associate Vice-President for Research at ASU Stephen Goodnick and Associate Research Professor at ASU Anatoli Korkin.

The aim of the workshop is collaboration and prospective partnership between American and Russian scientific representatives. It will be a great forum for non-profit organization, companies, universities and research centers of the both countries.

More details about the workshop can be found on this Arizona State University webpage.

As for NT-MDT, it’s a trifle unusual in that it’s both an instrumentation company and it sells products to educators. Here’s their mission statement (from their About page),

Our mission is to enable researchers, engineers and developers to conduct nanoscale research by creating ever more perfect nanotechnology instrumentation. Along the way, we maintain a global perspective, always taking into consideration the needs of student in the classroom, the researcher at the cutting edge in the laboratory, and the practicalities of industrial R&D.

This reminds me a little of Apple which got its MAC computers into schools so that youngsters (who grow into adults) would choose to purchase Macs in the future. In this case, NT-MDT a company which produces equipment for scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is reaching out to educators who need equipment such as SPM’s in the classroom. So the company hosts workshops and conference about nanotechnology and, yes, they have a platform such as NANOEDUCATOR which bundles their SPM’s with software and other materials appropriate for teachers (from the product page),

The emerging field of nanotechnology offers promise in the development of different areas of life – from environmental protection to consumer goods production, from electronics to energetics, from healthcare to aerospace defense.

Thus the application of nanotechnology has a great influence not only on science, but also on daily activity, therefore, mentoring the next generation of researchers in nanoscience by means of thorough hands-on training is an all-important question.

For this purpose we designed NANOEDUCATOR – the scientific training complex with a set of learning aids, accessories for introducing students to nanotechnology and giving them a basic understanding of how work with objects at nanoscale level.

NANOEDUCATOR, student oriented SPM, is your key to the minuscule world, developed for use by even first-time microscope users, it can navigate through the step-by-step operation. This device is designed to capture the students interest in science and train future nanotechnologists using both AFM and STM techniques.

I gather the company sells its standard markets and the education market separately as it encourages brand awareness amongst youngsters.