Foresight Institute

05.22.19

Join Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart and a hand-picked team of researchers to work on cutting hedge nanotechnology challenges: Apply now for our Fall Workshop! 🥽⚗️🔬🦠

First round of applications closes Saturday June 15th.

We cordially invite you to apply to participate in the interactive technical competition “Contemporary Materials Science: How Can Molecular Machines Help?”, co-chaired by Prof. Fraser Stoddart and Dr. Melissa Dumartin, Northwestern Univ.

The competition will be held Friday and Saturday, September 20-21, 2019 near the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Illinois. In order to produce the best results, your attendance is required for all daytime sessions. The optional Feynman Prize Dinner will be Saturday evening.

This meeting is part of Foresight’s invitational technical competition series. These events are highly result-oriented: In two days, multidisciplinary teams of scientists and technologists compete to develop project proposals leveraging their scientific disciplines to address urgent challenges for humanity.

A major motivation for the focus on molecular machines is the tremendous potential to heal the Earth's environment, revolutionize medical care for human healthspan and longevity, and develop materials with unprecedented properties and functions including sensing, computation, and actuation. In this workshop, a multidisciplinary group of specialists in target technical areas will collaborate with those tackling the challenges of atomically-precise 3D structures and molecular machines, including construction pathways using chemistry, applied physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and engineering.

Participants will be drawn from a wide variety of fields, not limited to materials science and molecular machines.

Areas to be addressed include the design and construction of complex structures and molecular machines built via organic and inorganic chemical synthesis; objects and devices constructed from DNA, RNA, proteins, or biomimetic polymers; construction via scanning probe; and other approaches to building with molecular precision from the bottom up.

Rather than ask each participant to formally present their current research, the process enables all participants to actively use their research, knowledge, and skills in a multidisciplinary group to create new, fundable research proposals. These are then presented to the full group, and a panel of expert judges will select winners in a variety of categories. Videos of all presentations are posted online.

Your participation should speed your current research, explore novel funding sources, assist you in finding multidisciplinary collaborators, and stimulate entirely new, fundable research projects.

To get an idea of what our technical competitions are like, please see this 4-minute summary video with competition co-chair Sir Fraser Stoddart, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSP4-Fhbdg

For an example of the project proposals generated at these events, please see AI for Nanoscale Design, the winning research proposal at a previous competition: youtu.be/EYmFBi1jZKs

Foresight Institute, which administers the Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology, is handling logistics. Foresight is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to advancing transformative technologies for the benefit of life, and the biosphere.

Your registration fee after approval is $275 which covers the cost of meals for the weekend. The optional Feynman Prize Dinner
is $75. Limited scholarships will available for a registration fee waiver.

Questions? Please contact Marcia Seidler at conference (at) foresight.org. ... See MoreSee Less

Application for Sept. 2019 Technical Competition—Contemporary Materials Science: How Can Molecular Machines Help?

First round of applications closes Saturday June 15th. We cordially invite you to apply to participate in the interactive technical competition “Contemporary Materials Science: How Can Molecular Mac...