Tag Archives: NINT

What happened to Canada’s National Insitute of Nanotechnology?

It’s been a while since I’ve visited Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology’s (NINT) website and since it’ s pretty slow on the news front these days I figured I’d check out their news releases. It wasn’t there! It’s been absorbed into the National Research Council’s (NRC) site.

These things usually portend some sort of political shenanigans, which can range from internal NRC politics to federal policy mandates to funding issues, or some combination of them all. In NINT’s case, you can also include the provincial government (Alberta) as they were (and possibly still are) funding a significant portion of the institute’s budget.

The NINT information now available has been ‘branded’ by the NRC. It looks slick and seems a bit better organized than it was in some respects. One exception is in the area of media information. NINT media releases are now grouped with all of the NRC releases making NINT information harder to find. As well, it’s harder to find contact details for the NINT media relations/communications folks.

Taking into account the loss of the NanoBusiness Alliance in Toronto, Nanotech BC’s imperiled future, and NINT’s loss of its ‘brand’, the nanotechnology future is not looking so bright in Canada.

And on something completely unrelated, Vancouver’s (Canada) Jazz Festival is taking place right now and tonight (July 2, 2009) local jazz songstress, Laura Werth will be at:

Capone’s restaurant
1141 Hamilton St.
Vancouver, Canada
604.684.7900

7:30 pm – 11:30 pm
Weaver & Werth Music Group
Laura Werth — Vocals
Ingrid Stitt — Sax
Rick Kilburn — Bass
Rob Weaver — Piano
Nino Di Pasquale — Drums

If you want to preview the music, Laura has a few tracks for listening here.

Waiting for Martha

Last April (2008), Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) announced a new chairperson for their board, Martha Cook Piper. I was particularly interested in the news since she was the president of the University of British Columbia (UBC) for a number of years during which she maintained a pretty high profile locally and, I gather, nationally. She really turned things around at UBC and helped it gain more national prominence.

I contacted NINT and sent some interview questions in May or June last year. After some months (as I recall it was Sept. or Oct. 2008), I got an email address for Martha and redirected my queries to her. She was having a busy time during the fall and through Christmas into 2009 with the consequence that my questions have only recently been answered. At this point, someone at NINT is reviewing the answers and I’m hopeful that I will finally have the interview in the near future.

There is a documentary about Ray Kurzweil (‘Mr. Singularity’) making the rounds. You can see a trailer and a preview article here at Fast Company.

As you may have guessed, there’s not a lot of news today.

Canada’s nano article numbers (part 1) and what happened to Martha Cook Piper?

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….