Santa Barbara, Calif. – The NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society, in collaboration with the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), hosted an educators’ workshop this week designed to help science educators integrate nanotechnology and society components into undergraduate coursework.

Julie Dillemuth, CNS Education Coordinator and workshop participant, presented highlights from the recently concluded 2008 Summer Undergraduate Internship Program in order to illustrate ways in which students and educators alike may explore the social and economic effects of nanotechnology.

Dillemuth explained that the five CNS interns, representing a variety of disciplines, were broken into two groups: Solar Nanotechnologies and Nanosilver Technologies.  Within each group, interns chose specific nano-enabled products already on the market in order to track the life of nanoparticles in consumer products, from design and production ultimately to the consumer.  The products researched by interns included a washing machine using silver nanoparticles and a teddy bear with antimicrobial nanoparticles.

“As a team, the interns could compare research notes and ideas, but then they had the freedom to go their own way to research the individual products they’d chosen,” she explained.

The nano-enabled product focus of the eight-week 2008 CNS Internship Program was inspired by three elements: the “Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” book by Dr. Pietra Rivoli which traces the life of a tee-shirt’s production; an existing course on commodity chains and globalization taught by CNS-UCSB collaborator Gary Gereffi at Duke University; and the recent “Nano-Days” event in which CNS graduate fellows engaged with the community to discuss nano-enabled products already on the market.

Through the internship program, interns were not only trained in social science research methods and modes of presenting research results, but they also contributed to current working group research.  In fact, two of the interns will be continuing on with CNS-UCSB through the academic year, and two others were chosen by INSET (Internships in Nanosystems, Science, Engineering, and Technology) to present their research findings at the Sigma Xi Student Research Conference in Washington, DC in November.

Rachel Parker, CNS Graduate Fellow and UC Santa Barbara Ph.D. student in Sociology, and Erica Lively, CNS Graduate Fellow and UCSB Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, also spoke at the educators’ workshop, focusing on the experience they gained as intern mentors.

“This is a program that could be emulated fairly easily,” explained Parker to the group of educators seeking to introduce nanotechnology and society into their own curricula.  “It would be advantageous to extend the program to a period of more than eight weeks, but in the short amount of time, we are definitely happy with the results.”