GE Global Research

I just returned from the 2010 Microscopy and Microanalysis (M&M) meeting which was held in Portland, Oregon on August 1-5.  M&M is the premiere annual meeting for materials scientists, biological scientists and nanotechnologists who use microscopy or microanalysis instrumentation.  I wanted to take this opportunity to provide a fast summary of the meeting.    The meeting program can be found at: M&M 2010 EXPO

Portland offered an excellent venue for the meeting.  The initial feedback on the location has been very favorable – Portland is being considered to host the 2015 meeting!

Meeting statistics:

Total attendance was: 2767

Number of scientific attendees: 1699

Number of vendors was: 1031

Number of presentations was: 1039

Prior to the start of the meeting twelve one day short courses were offered.  The meeting started on Monday with three Plenary Special Lectures: “What Microscopy Can Tell Us About Alzheimers and Related Diseases” by Mark Welland (University of Cambridge, UK), “Albert Crewe and the First Atomic Imaging with STEM” by Michael Isaacson (University of California, Santa Cruz) and “The Early History of Life: Solution to Darwin’s Dilemma” by J. William Schopf (University of California, Los Angeles).  Awards were presented between the Plenary Lectures.  Plenary Lectures at the M&M meeting were resumed in 2009 (after a few year hiatus) – and the feedback on these lectures has been very positive.

The 2010 M&M meeting program included numerous symposia on Advances in Instrumentation and Techniques, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences , as well as 3  Technologists’ Forum Symposia; tutorials were also provided.

I co-chaired the 3^rd bi-annual symposium “A06 – Surface Microscopy and Microanalysis in Materials and Biological Systems” with Jennifer Pett-Ridge and John Chaney.  Our symposium ran for 2 ½ days (which is the largest surface symposium yet).  We are excited that surface analysis is becoming an integral part of the M&M meeting.  In our symposium, we had exceptional presentations from researchers emphasizing state of the art surface analytical instrumentation, advanced data analysis tools, the use of complementary surface analytical instrumentation to perform a complete analysis of complex materials and/or biological systems, and the challenges that surface analysts face.

The Invited Speakers (and their association) for our symposium were:
Tony Ohlhausen – Sandia National Laboratory, Sankar Rama – Physical Electronics, Dave Surman – Kratos, Tim Nunney – Thermo Fisher, Dave Castner – University Washington, David Joy – University of Tennessee, Scott Bryan – Physical Electronics, Barry Wise – Eigenvector Research, Peter Williams – Arizona State University, Manfred Auer – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Peter Weber – Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Steve Golledge – University Oregon, Al Schultz – Ionwerks, Jeff Lince – The Aerospace Corporation, Matt Linford – Brigham Young University, Clive Walker – European Commission Joint Research Centre, Don Baer – PNNL, Chanmin Su – Veeco, Thomas Grehl – IonTof.

The M&M meeting always has an exceptional vendor exhibition. Many of the vendors bring instrumentation and perform “demos” right at the conference!  The meeting also had poster sessions on Mon, Tue, and Wed nights.

The 2011 M&M meeting will take place in Nashville, TN August 7-11, 2011.

Following the M&M meeting, I visited Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ( PNNL) with a few of my GE Global Research colleagues.  I gave a talk “Surface and Interface Analysis Needs in an Industrial Research and Development Laboratory: General Electric Global Research Center”, we toured many of the laboratories, and participated in a discussion with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL ) team regarding their user facility.

It was great to see some familiar faces both at M&M and PNNL I also enjoyed speaking with many young technologists.  I am looking forward to following up on many of the technical discussions I had at the meeting and exploring some of the topic areas discussed.

This past June I was asked to “volunteer” for a video interview as part of a a new creative initiative called the GE Show to highlight GE Healthcare solutions to improve hospital efficiency and safety. In two previous occasions, I was involved in quick video presentations using a Flip camera. However, this time a team of professional producers from the Barbarian Group was going to do the recording. I have to admit, for a career researcher, the idea of creating a two-minute video was a little scary and felt more challenging than developing technologies to operate hospitals at 90% plus census levels consistently, economically, and safely.

After several iterations for editing the script and numerous organizational approvals, the date was set to do the recording. I was puzzled when the producer asked to block a five-hour period to complete shooting the raw material. When four team members with several large containers, lights and cameras showed up, I started to get really nervous. But the team was very professional, friendly and helpful, and the video recording ended after five hours with everybody exhausted but happy that it worked out OK.

The increased demand due to Insurance Reform, aging baby boomer population, and the limited supply of caregivers require a new way of thinking. I am happy that I was able to contribute to the GE Show highlighting the importance of managing hospitals more efficiently and providing care more safely though technology.

At the same time I feel uncomfortable that so many folks who contribute to the future state vision, the invention, and the development of these technologies are not recognized in this piece. This year only, about fifty GE Global Research researchers are involved in the technology development for improved hospital design, more effective management of  hospital capacity, and for assuring that patient care is delivered safely. At the same time, there are at least two-dozen GE Healthcare business leaders and employees who provide leadership and domain and technical support for these technologies. And, equally important, we have our validation partners like Yale, Tucson Medical Center, Calgary, Bassett, and Mount Sinai who help us better understand the “real-world” needs and test our technologies in their hospitals to make sure they are effective.

Hello Earth !

We are very enthusiastic about our new DARPA Program to develop innovative bio-inspired nanostructured sensors that would enable faster, more selective chemical detection. This program is a collaborative effort of GE Global Research with the Air Force Research Laboratory,  State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Exeter and includes for several important tasks as shown in the graphic to the left. Three years ago, we discovered (Nature Photonics 2007, 1, 123-128.) that nanostructures from wing scales of butterflies exhibited acute chemical sensing properties. Since then, we have been developing a dynamic, new sensing platform that replicates these unique properties.

The main focus of our new very challenging program is to eliminate the serious limitation of existing sensors – their poor selectivity – and to demonstrate selective detection of analytes of interest in the presence of several closely related interferences. One can argue that to meet this goal is impossible and it is “science fiction”. We would fully support this statement if one were using conventional sensing approaches based on univariate sensor responses or combining individual sensors in arrays. The philosophy of sensor arrays brings one only to a certain level of improved performance of an array over an individual sensor, without the ability for accurate, reliable, and dynamic sensing in complex realistic situations.

Conventional gas sensors do not compete for the resolution and selectivity with sophisticated high-end laboratory instrumentation that is designed to identify and quantify unknowns down to ppb-ppt levels in complex mixtures containing hundreds or thousands of volatiles. Nevertheless, gas sensors attempt to compete with other fieldable microanalytical instruments. Over the recent years, these instruments have become more portable, more energy-efficient, and less costly. For example, advances in miniaturization and ionization sources in mass spectrometry are bringing micromachined mass-spectrometry devices to the point of operating at ambient atmospheric pressure without vacuum pumps. Advances in miniaturization in ion mobility spectrometry are bringing these devices to the form factors and power requirements similar to conventional packaged sensor systems. Advances in miniaturization in gas chromatography are establishing the ability to detect and quantify a dozen of volatiles in less than a minute with cell-phone-sized micro-gas analyzers.

While we and other proponents of gas sensor technologies continue to bring the old arguments of low sensor cost and its small size, these arguments, one by one, become less valid when comparing to the state-of-the-art, fieldable microanalytical instruments based on competing detection concepts.

Our DARPA-funded program will detonate this status quo and will demonstrate how to selectively detect numerous gases with a single sensor. I would like to point out that about 100 years ago, Clyde W. Mason studied the effects of liquids of different refractive index on the color of the reflected light when these liquids were applied onto wings of iridescent butterflies. Our demonstrations of these effects are shown below.   Here are Color changes of a Morpho butterfly upon exposure to liquids of different refractive index.  On the left is a butterfly before exposure to liquids and on the right are the results of exposure of the left forewing to ethanol (n = 1.362) and left hindwing to toluene (n = 1.497).

In our research at GE, we have learned how to take this knowledge of the natural optical responses of nanostructures of butterfly scales to pure solvents of different refractive index and to expand this optical phenomena into the selective detection of numerous gases and their mixtures with a single bio-inspired photonic structure as shown in the figure below.

How many gases can we detect with a single bio-inspired nanostructure? Stay tuned for our reports on 2, 5, maybe 10, and maybe even 20 gases with a single sensor. Science fiction or science? Stay tuned and you will be the first to say “wow”….

Hi everybody, I just wanted to put up a quick post to share with you some video from a recent event we had at the John F. Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore. This year we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of our site and to kick this off, we had a drum jam on campus that was attended by nearly 4000 employees, each one of us with a drum… unbelievable! This was the first in a series of events that will be celebrating the decennial so I guess that you could say that it started with a bang– literally!

When we first started the drumming, the noise made the vuvuzelas from the World Cup seem like ancient history. However, it eventually flowed into a finely orchestrated drum jam. It was an energizing and memorable event. Enjoy the video!