CMU dendrimer researcher taking world stage
Donald
Tomalia, distinguished research scientist and director of CMU's
National Dendrimer and Nanotechnology Center, is openly ambitious
about his goals for CMU.
“We want CMU to be the center of nanotechnology for the whole country,” says Tomalia, who is known around the globe as the founder of a new class of macromolecular dendritic polymers with tremendous potential for the development of new products and benefits to society.
Yet each discovery of another dendrimer increases the need for a system for classifying these compounds. Tomalia sees the task as no less significant than chemist John Dalton's work to establish the periodic table of the elements in the early 19th century.
“That's what all the excitement is about,” Tomalia says. “I predict that in five to 10 years, we'll see periodic tables at the nano level. That idea has taken the world by firestorm.”
To Tomalia, that means positioning the NDNC at the forefront of the worldwide initiative. The emerging chart already has more than a half dozen entries, including a new dendrimer, yet unnamed, that he and his Swedish colleague Jørn Christensen discovered this summer.
“People have been making these things, but there has been no systematic unified thinking about how they behave as a science,“ Tomalia says. “We are simply borrowing the step logic of John Dalton and applying it to the evolution of a central dogma for synthetic nanochemistry.”
In addition to running the NDNC, Tomalia presented a keynote lecture for the National Science Foundation dendrimer director's conference held in Arlington in December, and he is preparing to address the 2009 International Dendrimer Symposium in Stockholm, Sweden this spring. CMU hosted this annual meeting of dendrimer scientists back in 2005.
“Nanochemistry is changing all the rules,” Tomalia says. “The world
is looking for new materials like this with new properties and
behaviors that will lead to opportunities to create new companies,
products and benefits for society. That will be my dream come true.”
