Millions of dollars of lab equip-ment rests at the
center of the Materials Research
Institute, just waiting for someone to peer through one of the
many microscopes or tap one of the many keyboards. And wrapped around
the tall tubes and complex engineering is kitchen-grade aluminum
foil.
“We get a lot of comments about that,” explains Nick
Winograd, Evan Pugh
Professor of Chemistry. “It’s
the best for conducting heat and spreading it evenly across the
area.”
And that seems to be what Winograd has been able to do in spreading
his interests evenly across his life. The son of accomplished musicians,
Winograd, who attained his first faculty job at Purdue University
at age 23, was already a promising young scientist in the 1980s
when he received the Founder’s Prize of the Texas
Instruments Foundation in recognition of his work. Now, decades
later, having just received his twelfth National
Science Foundation grant in a row, Winograd and his wife and
collaborator, Barbara Garrison, find time for working
on their new home, bicycling locally and abroad, and collecting
wine.
“Being in this business you travel a lot, and food and wine
are central to any culture,” Winograd says. “Over time
it’s a really good way to get to know people. Somehow it became
the fabric of our life.”
Winograd also likes to run, competing the last 17 years or so in
the Art Fest 10K, and
winning his age category last year. None of these pursuits is wasted
time. “You can do a lot of thinking about science while gardening
or jogging,” he said.
And there is no end to the passion he shows for his latest projects.
Using mass spectrometry technology that he created, Winograd and
his colleagues, including professor and head of the Department of
Chemistry, Andy Ewing, are attempting to get ion
beams to work in a biological or imaging modality. On his computer
screen, for instance, he shows a graphic representation of the surface
of a cell getting blasted with buckyball C60, but says there is
plenty more to be done.
“Imagine taking a single biological cell and having enough
sensitivity and lateral resolution to see every type of molecule
in that cell,” he says. “It’s a very satisfying
aspect of science—spending a lot of my career doing fundamental
work, then using a lot of what we have learned to do something that
can have an important societal impact.”
Winograd, who holds five patents for his work, was instrumental
in establishing a center for the study of the interaction of particle
beams and solid surfaces at Penn State. Research at the center is
leading to a better understanding of electronic materials.
“Any scientist is looking to visualize something about our
universe and see it in ways that are unique, that other people don’t
see, so you can explain it to them,” he said. “Ideally
you would like to see your work have some benefit—discover
some new drug, or provide some piece of equipment, that makes people’s
lives better. You don’t really do science to punch a time
clock.”
Suzan Erem
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