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GRADUATE FELLOW RECEIVES PRIZE FOR BEST POSTER AT NATIONAL
SYMPOSIUM
UCSB graduate student praised for presentation on findings
on histories of nanotechnology advocates
Santa Barbara, Calif. – Mary Ingram-Waters, graduate fellow with the National
Science Foundation’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) and Ph.D.
student in sociology at UC Santa Barbara, has won the award for “Best Poster”
at the Symposium on Social Studies of Nanotechnology in Philadelphia.
Her poster is entitled “Space Flight, Frostbite, and Foresight:
Exploring the Connections Between the Pro-Space, Cryonics, and Nano Social
Movements.” The award comes with a $500
cash prize, sponsored by the University
of Pennsylvania’s Nano/Bio
Interface Center (NBIC).
“It's encouraging that the judges found my research to be
both interesting and worthy of the prize ‘best poster,’” said Mary
Ingram-Waters. “I think we can learn a
lot about how nanotechnology emerged into public discourse by looking at the
histories of those nanotechnology advocates who popularized the concept in the
1980s. Over the next year, I plan to
continue this line of research with Professor Patrick McCray here at CNS-UCSB
by interviewing more of nanotechnology’s early advocates.”
Ingram-Waters’ poster demonstrated her research on social
movement theory to understand the activities of advocates for space colonies,
nanotechnology, and cryonics in the 1970s and 1980s. Several Ph.D. students competed in the poster
competition, presenting their own individual academic research. In awarding the prize to Ingram-Waters, the
judges praised Ingram-Waters in particular for her articulate and enthusiastic
presentation.
Ingram-Waters is a two-time recipient of CNS-UCSB’s Graduate
Research Fellowship. Prior to her work
at CNS-UCSB, she was a research fellow at the Institute for the Advanced
Studies on Science, Technology, and Society (IAS-STS), in Graz,
Austria, and the recipient
of the doctoral fellowship at the Capps
Center for the Study of
Religion in Public Life. She earned a
master’s degree in sociology from UC Santa Barbara, and bachelor’s degrees in sociology
and theater arts from the State University of West Georgia.
The Symposium on Social Studies of Nanotechnology was a
joint project between University
of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School of Business and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It gathered experts from around the country
to discuss emerging issues in nanotechnology.
Science Background
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of materials on a very
small scale. One nanometer is one
billionth of a meter. By comparison, DNA
is two nanometers wide, a red blood cell is 10,000 nanometers wide, and a
single strand of hair is 100,000 nanometers thick. Nanotechnology holds great potential in
virtually every sector of the economy, including electronics, medicine, and energy.
About CNS-UCSB
The mission of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society
(CNS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara
is to serve as a national research and education center, a network hub among
researchers and educators concerned with nanotechnologies’ societal impacts,
and a resource base for studying these impacts in the U.S. and
abroad.
The CNS carries out innovative and interdisciplinary
research in three key areas:
- the historical context of nanotechnologies;
- the institutional and industrial processes of technological
innovation of nanotechnologies along with their global diffusion and
comparative impacts; and
- the social risk perception and response to different
applications of nanotechnologies.
The CNS is funded by an award from the National Science
Foundation.
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