2012 Foresight Institute Distinguished Student Award

for the college undergraduate or graduate student
whose work in nanotechnology is deemed most notable

Submissions/nominations were due October 31, 2012

The student should not have received their PhD before January 2013.

Submissions/nominations were due October 31, 2012

Winner of 2012 Award Announced

Left to right: The Student Award Sponsors John Randall representing James Von Ehr, Founder, Zyvex Group; James Ellenbogen of MITRE; Ravi Pandya of Microsoft; 2012 Award winner David Walker of Northwestern University

The 2012 Student Award was awarded January 12, 2013 at the Feynman Awards Banquet of the Foresight Technical Conference “Illuminating Atomic Precision“.

The Foresight Institute is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2012 Distinguished Student Award is David Walker, a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

David has already made significant contributions to the science of nanotechnology, by using electrostatic interactions to precisely manipulate nanoparticles. His work has been featured in leading nanoscience and chemistry journals such as Nano Letters, Angewandte Chemie, and Nature Nanotechnology, and has also been covered in popular media such as BBC News, Forbes, and Popular Science. David is currently working on the use of electrostatic confinement at the nanoscale to program the chemical properties of organic molecules for use in self-assembly and catalytic relays.

The Foresight Distinguished Student Award was established in 1997, and is given to a college student or graduate student whose work is notable in the field of nanotechnology. The award includes a $1,000 prize, and an expenses-paid trip to the 2013 Foresight Technical Conference: Illuminating Atomic Precision, to be held January 11-13 in Palo Alto, CA. Information and registration for the conference may be found at http://www.foresight.org/conference/

Foresight Institute is a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies. Founded in 1986, its mission is to discover and promote the benefits, and help avoid the dangers, of nanotechnology, AI, biotech, and similar life-changing developments.

Foresight is devoted to stimulating the development of atomically precise nanotechnology that will truly transform our future, from medicine to the environment to space settlement. We bring that vision and goal to new audiences, including inspiring young researchers. More information about the Foresight Institute, the technical conference, and the Distinguished Student Award, may be found at http://www.foresight.org, or by contacting [email protected].

Relevant Research Areas

Research areas considered relevant to molecular nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing include but are not limited to:

artificial molecular machines
atomically-precise construction
biomolecular machinery
computational chemistry and molecular modeling
mechanosynthesis
nanomechanical engineering
nanomanipulation
natural molecular machines
scanning probes and nanometrology
self-assembly
self-replicating machines
supramolecular chemistry
ultra-precision machining

Special consideration will be given to submissions clearly leading toward the construction of a general-purpose molecular assembler. Applicants wishing further information on the field of the prize are referred to the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (Wiley Interscience, 1992).

Distinguished Student Award Established in 1997

The Foresight Institute Distinguished Student Award was established in 1997 and institutionalizes the first grant made in 1996 by Foresight to John M. Michelsen, a University of California at Irvine chemistry student.

Previously awarded Distinguished Student Awards

Gaming the Future: The Book!