Thursday, July 16, 2009

Nano@Tech: Past and Future

It is always difficult to assess quantitatively how you are doing when you undertake an enterprise that involves communication, marketing, and outreach. How many people are receiving your message? How are they responding to it? What is the impact you are making? The answers to these questions can be used to refine your approach, if necessary, and sometimes they even provide you a gentle pat on the back for a job well done.

As Nanotechnology Research Center friends and users know, Nano@Tech is a seminar series, open to the entire community, held at Georgia Tech on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month during the academic year. Since our featured speakers come from all of the disciplines involved in nanotechnology research, education, commercialization, and policy, the seminars provide an excellent opportunity to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration.

For the last several years, we have videotaped most of these seminars and posted them on the SMARTech website, which is Georgia Tech’s archive of scholarly materials. Since these videos are quite large (some > 100 MB in size), requiring both an interest and commitment to download them for viewing, I was surprised to learn that they have attracted an on-line audience (90% of whom found the site via a Google search). For the 12 seminar videos from the 2008-09 academic year, there have been more than 800 downloads (so far). These statistics suggest that Nano@Tech is making an impact outside our immediate attending audience.

The Fall 2009 series will begin in a few weeks. If you can join us in person, please mark your calendars using the schedule below. More information will be coming for those on the email list, and if you want to get on this list just send me an email at david.gottfried@nrc.gatech.edu.

Aug. 25 - Alan Porter (GT-Public Policy)
Sept. 8 - Tom O'Brien/Swami Rajaraman (Axion Biosystems)
Sept. 22 - Devin Brown (GT-NRC)
Oct. 13 - Jason Nadler (GTRI)
Oct. 27 - Gang Bao (GT-BME)
Nov. 10 - Margaret Kosal (GT-Int'l. Affairs)
Dec. 8 - Gangli Wang (GSU-Chemistry)

2 comments:

  1. Reading this post, I am struck by the extent to which technology has changed our lives in the last few years. I can hardly remember a world without the Internet, Google and downloaded videos. Our ability to access new and updated information increases every day, and your blog is part of that information explosion.

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  2. Great job! it's important that everybody is informed about this new and revolutionary science: nanotech.

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