[LISA] Welcome to a special 15-year anniversary episode of Stories from the NNI. I'm Lisa
Friedersdorf,  Director of the National
Nanotechnology Coordination Office or NNCO.
Today it's my pleasure to welcome
Celia Merzbacher, Assistant Director of
the Quantum Economic Development
Consortium at SRI International.
Prior to joining SRI, Celia was the Director
of Strategic and Institutional Planning
and the ARPA-E program manager at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory. She also
served as the Vice President for
Innovative Partnerships at the
Semiconductor Research Corporation, or
SRC, and as an Assistant Director for
Technology Research and Development at
the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy. Celia thank you so much for taking
the time to be with us today. To get things
started, could you share a little bit
about yourself and how you first got
involved in nanotechnology?
[CELIA] Well thanks Lisa, it's nice to be with you. When I think back in the 80s and 90s I was
doing a lot of Materials Research. First
as a Postdoc at Lawrence Livermore
National Lab and then as a Research
Scientist at the Naval Research
Laboratory in Washington DC. I was
studying the atomic structure of
everything from materials proposed for
nuclear waste storage and
high-temperature superconductors to
space-based optics and nanostructured
aerogels. And it was really nanomaterials
science only we weren't calling it that
and in 2003 I was recruited to the White
House Office of Science and Technology
Policy to help lead the new National
Nanotechnology Initiative, or NNI,
which was really in the early days. And
as attention and investments were
growing we had to address issues like
environmental health and safety and
public communication and outreach and
education and standards. In addition to
research. So it was exciting to be
working on an emerging area of technology with
enormous potential for all kinds of practical application and use and public benefit.
[LISA] So you're
currently the Assistant Director of the
Quantum Economic Development Consortium at SRI, which was just launched at the
end of last year. So can you
tell us a little bit more about this activity?
[CELIA] Well the QEDC is a consortium
aimed at accelerating and strengthening
the US commercial quantum information
technology industry. It's really a
public-private partnership. It has
support from industry member companies
and from NIST, the National Institute for
Standards and Technology. Understanding
the quantum properties and behavior of
materials and components and systems is
the subject of considerable research
right now and government agencies
including NIST and NSF and DOE and DOD
and others are growing their spending in
related areas. And at the same time the
private sector is making some really big
investments as well there's a lot of
activity going on both in the publicly
funded sector and in the private sector
and the QEDC is going to bring together
companies from across what we think of
as the quantum supply chain and help
identify gaps in enabling technologies
that are going to make it possible to
realize the benefits of the quantum
technologies that are being researched.
There's need for standards and
performance metrics and there's a lot of
workforce needs that are, perhaps in some
sense, short term because eventually
there will be a lot more students
graduating, but right now there's a real
shortage of skilled workers in the space. So these are all areas that the
consortium is going to help to address
and once these gaps are identified then
that consortium can figure out ways to
help solve them.
[LISA] With your background in
nanotechnology and now moving into
quantum information science,
how does nanotechnology enable quantum
information science?
[CELIA] Well in a lot of
ways quantum information science and
technology feels like nano did 15 years
ago. There's a lot of excitement in the
research community and there's a lot of
well attended conferences going on and
publications being made. And at the same
time there's a lot of hype in the
business sector. And, on the other hand,
people who aren't perhaps in the middle
of it, policymakers and the public, have
trouble even understanding what it's
about. And so the QEDC really needs to,
in order to accomplish its mission,
do more than just help advance the
technology, but it also needs to
communicate to various stakeholders
about the potential and help businesses
who may not have expertise to understand
how it could help them do their business. Now there's a significant overlap
between quantum information science and
technology and nanotechnology because
nano I think of as being the fundamental
understanding of materials at sort of
the level of atoms and molecule. And
that fundamental understanding is going
to be essential to progress in quantum
information science and technology. It's
really key to understanding what is
going on that is controlling the
development of materials for quantum
devices,  controlling system noise, which
is sort of underlying a lot of the
challenges to quantum computing,
integrating quantum devices with what we
think of as classical or traditional
technologies, and networks and so on. So
there's a real sort of adjacency and
even overlap between nanotechnology and
quantum information science and
technology. I see quantum information
science and technology as a convergent
area with underneath it nanotechnology
advances being important, networking and
computing and areas like optoelectronics
and optophotonics. And each of those
areas, in and of themselves are
multidisciplinary, made up of physics and
chemistry and materials and engineering. So I think that this is just another
example of where the leading edge of
science and technology involves the
convergence of a lot of existing areas
of research.
[LISA] Well it sounds like a lot of
fun. Reflecting though, on the NNI, and
part of this podcast series is to
celebrate some of the activities or
accomplishments that have been made
since the law was signed in 2003. So, from
your perspective, what are the things
that really strike you or stand out to
you?
[CELIA] So looking back I think that
nanotechnology has gone from being kind
of what I think of as a buzzword to
being reality. And I remember early on
worrying that there was going to be some
backlash because
of some concern that grew and and was
hard to address perhaps and sort of like
the GMO concerns impacted that area of
development that we thought something
might similar might happen and it was
part of the reason that there was
activity and investment from the very
beginning in understanding potential for
risks and understanding interactions
between nanomaterials and the
environment, and the body. And so I think
that over the years that course, that
approach, has really been a hallmark of
the nanotechnology program and also has
been part of the reason for its success
and the fact that the science was able
to sort of progress and lead and follow
toward the benefits that everybody was
hoping for at the outset. I think on the
commercial side there's really less
concern about whether something's
nanotechnology or not. The ability to
control and operate at the nanoscale is
being incorporated in a lot of different
ways and products and processes by
business. They may or may not think of it
as nanotechnology at all so I like to
say there's not really a nano stock
index necessarily but many of the big
companies that are very successful are
using nanotechnology today. Thanks to the NNI.
[LISA] One of the things that we hear a
lot is that the collaborative
environment, the ecosystem, the
multidisciplinarity, that was developed
under the NNI made it different than
the way science was done before. Do you
have thoughts on that?
[CELIA] I agree a hundred
percent. I think that, and I give credit
really to one of the founders of the
initiative, Mike Roco,
who was really very visionary and
broad thinker. So by design, the people
who started the program saw
nanotechnology as multidisciplinary and
therefore cutting across all kinds of
boundaries. And whether that meant
divisions within funding agencies, or
departments at universities, or offices
within professional societies and
scientific organizations, nanotechnology
didn't just fit simply and neatly into
any one area and so it forced the
bureaucracies and the cultures of those
organizations
change and I think that in some ways is
one of the biggest impacts of
nanotechnology to this day and not only
do faculty continue to do
multidisciplinary team-based research,
but the students who were there, you know,
learning and growing up in that
environment don't know another way in a
sense and so they've graduated now and
they think that's the only way to do
things in a sense. So I think that that
was one of the big impacts of the
nanotechnology program.
[LISA] I think that from
the NNI perspective, although there's
been nanoenabled products on the market
for decades, we're really seeing a
transition in mass applications of
nanotechnology you know in automotive,
and flat-screen TVs with quantum dots,
and other breakthroughs that are hitting
commercial markets but can be traced
back to research from the late 1980s.
You're mentioning that industry is
already making significant investments
in quantum and, of course, quantum science has been a topic of study for
decades as well. Do you see that it's
really ready for broad commercial
applications?
[CELIA] I think a lot of times when
people hear quantum they think of
quantum computing which is probably the
longer time horizon application versus
you could make the case that there are
applications of quantum phenomena like
atomic clocks and things like that today
and so there is a spectrum. And I do
think that it's very appropriate in a
sense for the government to be shooting
for that longer-term advance and
technology development if you will. Along
the way, just like the Apollo program,
there's gonna be spin-offs, I think, in a
lot of different areas and so whether
it's sensing, or communication, or
simulation and modeling, and there's just
a lot of different applications of the
understanding of quantum behavior and
the ability to control it. And there's
right now it does have a bit of the Wild
West feeling and there are a lot of
different strategies being developed and
championed. So again, some of those may
prove out to be very general in their
application, some may be
more niche and be really well suited for
particular areas in particular
applications. We've been sort of spoiled
by Moore's law and the ability for this
one single technology to advance over
the decades in orders of magnitude that
may not be the model for the
technologies of the future
[LISA] So speaking of beyond Moore's law, I
actually wanted to ask a question about
your time at SRC and the Nanoelectronics
Research Initiative which was a
collaboration between SRC and NIST and
NSF, where the academics were looking at
beyond CMOS, or new technologies that
would advance past the end of Moore's
law. What do you think are the lessons
learned from that public-private partnership?
[CELIA] I am a huge fan of the NRI
model, where the needs of Industry and
the leading-edge research are aligned to
the point where it really makes sense
for this co-investment in that
fundamental research that industry will
take and use as it sort of sees fit. In
the case of nanoelectronics the
industry was extremely farsighted in
making investments in the potential
disruptive technology to their own
business in a sense, but they also
recognized that in order to continue the
sort of part of Moore's law that was the
performance trend, forget about the size
and the scaling and shrinking and so on,
but just that trend in performance. They
were going to have to make a step to new
technologies at some point in the future. And so investing early on was what they
felt was, you know, important seeds to
that future, their own sort of
self-interested investment. At the same
time, that model allows, not only for
industry to have some sort of influence
on the investment of research dollars,
but almost as important or more
important, it gives them contact in a
sense with faculty and student. And I
always felt that through the personal
interactions that took place between
industry experts
and the academics, both the
faculty and the students, there was a
real enhancement of the research and of
the educational experience that the
students had while they were in the
middle of their university years. So at
the end they may or may not choose to go
into industry, but they've had this
exposure they will always be thinking
about the sort of ultimate use of their
research, I think, because of that
experience. So I think there is huge
value to the educational process through
that kind of partnership. And I certainly
hope and will bring that lesson to the
quantum consortium as well.
[LISA] That's great. So, I want to look forward. Can you comment on where you see challenges facing the
world that may be solved in part by
nanotechnology?
[CELIA] I think, I have sort of
sometimes the simplistic way of thinking
about science and technology and I see
the sort of push aspect of it and the
advances through the investment in basic
scientific research that creates
something that could be applied and
helped solve a problem. And then you have
the pull, kind of aspect, where a real
problem is posed and the science and
research community thinks about how to,
what kind of research might it do to
address that problem and to solve that,
or to take it's sort of toolbox of
solutions and put them together in some
useful way that would solve a problem. So
I can almost not think of a problem in
the world that isn't potentially tackled
by a nano solution and I think that it's
really important, and the NNI has
been doing this for some time to
articulate those challenges in such a
way that the research community can roll
up its sleeves and really you know start
tackling those problems. So the
priorities of any particular
administration or you know if you look
out at the world, those are going to, maybe at a very high level be common, public
health, and clean water, and energy for
all that's affordable and so on. These
are problems that are going to be with
us forever in a sense. Trying to put them
in sort of the hands of the scientist
in a way that they can make some move
towards solving them I think is often
the challenge. And that's where
agencies that have a mission like DOE
and so on, NIH and others, I think have a
role to play in connecting those
societal challenges to their research
communities.
[LISA] I just want to tell you how
much I've enjoyed our conversation today
and I thank you for for taking the time
to talk with us. And I'm wondering do you
have any parting thoughts that you want
to leave with our listeners?
[CELIA] So I just want to thank you also for the opportunity. I see a sort of Moore's law
of nanotechnology the ability to control
and measure matter at always more
precise and higher resolution
capabilities and in areas where in one
time or another it was almost impossible,
biological materials posed a lot of
challenges to these kinds of nanoscale
controls, but you know those are being
overcome. So I see nanotechnology as
continuing to enable new capabilities
and the potential to address all of the
kinds of challenges that we discuss. So
I'll sort of wrap up with a paraphrase
of Richard Feynman's,
there's still plenty of room at the
bottom and I think that's true for many
years to come.
Thank you for joining us today for this
special 15-year anniversary edition of
Stories from the NNI. If you would
like to learn more about nanotechnology
please visit nano.gov or email us at
info@nnco.nano.gov and check back here
for more stories.
