$50K grant will fund Austin College nanotechnology research

SHERMAN, TX – Austin College was recently awarded a fifty-thousand dollar grant for their science department and they’re using it to do some cutting edge research.

“Nano technology has the possibility of revolutionizing who we are and what we do,” said Dr. Stephanie Gould, assistant chemistry professor.

Gould was awarded a $50,000 grant from the American Chemical Society to research nanogears.

“Oh I was thrilled,” said Gould. “The opportunity is wonderful. It’s going to extend my research for a few more years, allow me to hire more students to work on it, give better opportunities to those students. I’m really excited about it.”

Gould’s research focuses on building molecule sized gears that will eventually be used in nanomachines.

“We’re building a system and my system’s unique,” said Gould. “No one else in the world is working on that particular system which makes the work really fun because we’re discovering all sorts of new things every day.”

Advances in medicine like using nanomachines to take the cancer drugs directly to affected cells are of particular interest to student researcher Raven Clark.

“With chemo it attacks all the cells in their body and it’s, you know, devastating and it makes them even more sick,” Clark said. “But with this, long term, it can deliver the cancer drug to the cancer cell causing minimal damage to their body.”

Just like the gears in a car engine, Gould’s nanogear research is a small component of a much larger global project. But, through the sharing of information, Gould and scientists all over the world hope to one day construct a machine the size of a group of molecules that will change the world in a big way.

“I hope that within the two years of this grant that we’ll have some information that we can share with the world.”