Main contributors to the 10th Anniversary Swiss issue

Professor Viola Vogel mentions in her Editorial that this issue focuses on micro and nano technologies and related research. The papers in this part of the issue are from a few of the leading researchers and institutions in Switzerland working in these areas.

The following are brief biographical details of these few authors. In addition, we wanted to give LOC readers an insight into what makes Switzerland different to other countries in terms of funding and what advantages/disadvantages there are to carrying out research within this subject within Swiss institutes. Therefore, we posed a series of four questions to each author to elicit their views and opinions.

The questions posed were as follows:

(1) What advantages do you believe Swiss researchers have over researchers in other countries? (Or How does being located in Switzerland benefit your research in micro/nanotechnologies?)

(2) How much interaction do you have with Swiss industries/networks?

(3) What inspires you in this field of research?

(4) What, in your opinion, does the future hold for micro/nanotechnologies?

The responses to each of the questions accompany the author biographies.

Klaus Ensslin

Klaus Ensslin was born in Germany and received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in 1989. He was a postdoc at the University of California/Santa Barbara and at the University of Munich. Since 1995 he is Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. His current research interests are: semiconductor nanostructures, quantum effects in solid state system, novel quantum materials.

(1) Switzerland is very strong in nano because this research started here (STM, Binnig and Rohrer). There is also a lot of expertise in scanning probe techniques. ETH Zurich has the FIRST cleanroom, an excellent technology basis for all kinds of nanostructures.

(2) We have a little interaction with Swiss industry and there are more than enough networks to ensure academic/industrial collaboration.

(3) Colleagues, students, experimental results which seem to contradict everything we know, and novel materials all inspire me in this field of research.

(4) The future holds lots of interesting applications, awesome technological tools for experiments in the quantum domain, the possibility of tailoring semiconductors and other materials almost at will on (or close to) the atomic scale.

Olivier Frey

Olivier Frey was born in 1979 in Liestal, Switzerland. He received his Diploma in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich (ETHZ) in 2005. During his diploma thesis he worked on an “Autonomous Microfluidic Multi-Channel Chip for Real-Time PCR with Integrated Liquid Handling” at the Physical Electronics Laboratory (PEL) at ETHZ. This motivated him to work for another year in the field of μTAS at PEL, headed by Profs. Henry Baltes and Andreas Hierlemann. In January 2006, he joined the Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Laboratory (SAMLAB) of Prof. Nico de Rooij (University of Neuchâtel, since 2009 at EPF Lausanne). He received his PhD degree in 2010 at EPFL in the BioMEMS group of Prof. Milena Koudelka-Hep developing microfabricated biosensors for biomedical and neuroscience applications. His own research focuses on Biosensors/CMOS-electronics integration at the Bio Electronics Laboratory (BEL) at ETHZ.

(1) Several Research Institutes and companies in Switzerland were involved in the disciplines of micro and nanotechnology from early on. Therefore researchers can rely on excellent conditions, and well-established processes on continuously upgraded equipment. Actually, these developments are additionally accelerated by a strong market pull raised by Swiss located Pharma, Biotechnology and Biomedical industries.

(2) Micro and nanotechnology as an application-near research field provides a strong interaction with industry requesting innovative solutions for emerging disciplines. This is additionally supported by the Confederation's innovation promotion agency CTI “fostering knowledge and technology transfer between companies and universities” and providing high interest and adequate assistance in launching spin-off companies in tight collaboration with research facilities.

(3) Our inspirations are the convergence and interaction of many different disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Engineering when dimensions are scaled to the micro- and nanometre range together with a re-weighting of physical laws that can be used to solve problems in a simpler way.

(4) Microelectronics – existing for over half a century – is still a strong emerging field. The coupling of micro/nanoelectronics and micro/nanomechanics with life-science disciplines creates a variety of new questions and possibilities for looking at nature at higher resolution or for developing new products, which can facilitate and extend human life.

Bradley Nelson

Brad Nelson is the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich. His primary research focus is on microrobotics and nanorobotics with an emphasis on applications in biology and medicine. He received a B.S.M.E. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.S.M.E. from the University of Minnesota. He has worked as an engineer at Honeywell and Motorola and served as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana, Africa, before obtaining a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1995–1998) and an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota (1998–2002). He became a Full Professor at ETH Zürich in 2002.

(1) Switzerland is a country with a deep appreciation of science and technology and has a variety of funding mechanisms in place to ensure that resources are available for motivated scientists to pursue world class research. On a per capita basis, Switzerland must be one of the top countries in the world for providing funding for basic and applied research. And of course, Switzerland has a long, successful history of making small mechanical devices, i.e. watches.

(2) There are many research networks in Switzerland, such as the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Nano-Tera initiative, the SystemsX initiative as well as EU funded projects. Industry is also strongly interested in basic research. My group participates in a variety of these networks which helps expose us to research being pursued across the country.

(3) My research is primarily related to micro and nanorobotics. One aspect of these fields I find particularly interesting is in understanding how "intelligent behavior" scales, and how the physics that predominates at these varying scales changes the behaviors we must encode in the devices we fabricate. One question that I wonder about is what are the invariants that we can identify that contribute to intelligence at all size scales.

(4) As we all know, "it is hard to make predictions, especially about the future." But I am betting that one dream that is going to become reality is the development of very small devices with autonomous behavior that are able to target disease within the human body. We are just beginning to understand how to power these devices and what types of locomotion strategies to use as these devices scale from millimetres down to nanometres. How can we add sensing and computation to them? What new therapies will they enable? Several questions remain, but the field is beginning to move in interesting directions.

Ana Valero

Ana Valero received her MSc in Chemistry in 2001 at the University of Zaragoza. In 2002 she started her PhD in electrical engineering at the BIOS/Lab on a chip group of the MESA+ Institute at Twente University, under the supervision of Prof. Albert van den Berg. In 2007 she moved to Switzerland where she started her PostDoc with Prof. Philippe Renaud at EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique Federal Lausanne, where she is currently working. Her research interests include single cells on chips, separation devices, microanalysis systems and diagnosis on chip.

(1) There are several advantages to being a researcher in micro/nanotechnologies in Switzerland. Two of the most important Polytechnic Universities of Europe, EPFL and ETHZ, are located in Switzerland, they are considered as two of Europe's most innovative and productive technology institutes and well-ranked worldwide in terms of education and research. Moreover, they have a growing infrastructure facilitating multidisciplinary research, in association with other institutes such as CERN, CSEM, UniGeneve and have a good financial basis based on funding opportunities and support by the confederation. Being located in the heart of Europe makes partnerships with other institutions much easier. The Center of MicroNanotechnology (CMI) at the EPFL campus is considered one of the best academic cleanrooms in the world at the forefront of education and technological research with a very international and dynamic working environment and well-established links with other European and American centers to exchange information and experiences in the domain of micro-nanotechnology.

(2) There is an excellent interaction between research groups at EPFL and several companies or start-ups, thanks to the location of the Science Park on campus, which is home to more than 100 enterprises and numerous investors. EPFL is rich in new technology, research infrastructure, academic partnerships and other numerous forms of collaboration, making it a particularly attractive environment for start-ups and technology enterprises. Moreover, Switzerland is well known for the know-how of the watch industry for centuries and a considerable proportion of pharmaceutical and biotech companies in Europe are located in Switzerland. Both industries are closely related and very interested in the technological advances in micro-nanotechnologies, enabling tight collaborations with research institutes in the country.

(3) Working in this field of research, what mainly inspires me are the good opportunities we have in developing new technological platforms to target real applications in our daily lives. For example, the development of inexpensive and widely available diagnostics tests for home medical testing. I would hope that the things I help to develop have a final goal that is important somehow.

(4) I believe that micro and nanotechnologies will be key applications in medicine and environmental monitoring in the future, having great potential to improve human health and enrich our lives. Their development is still at the early stages but I think the future for new medical breakthroughs such as treating diseases at the molecular level or new methods to detect cancer earlier than has been possible so far, is nano. The integration of numerous materials and functions and the trend towards miniaturization is a very powerful factor for the development of innovative, smart, autonomous and self-powered systems with enormous applications within the automotive, the chemical, the life science, data processing and storage and the aerospace fields.

Horst Vogel

Horst Vogel studied chemistry at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, and did his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, investigating biomolecules by vibrational spectroscopy. After research stays at the Max-Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, the Biocenter at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, he was appointed as a professor for biophysical chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1994. The research of the Vogel lab concentrates on the following: (a) Biophysics and biochemistry of cellular signalling reactions mediated by ionotropic and G protein coupled receptors. (b) Self-assembly and folding of biopolymers in solution and at interfaces. (c) Development of bioanalytical techniques in the micro- and nanometre range. Born in Germany, Dr Vogel lives near Lausanne, Switzerland.

(1) Our research in micro- and nanotechnologies benefitted from special research programs launched by the Commission for Innovation and Technology (KTI/CTI) and from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). Within these programs we had tight collaborations between academic and industrial research groups which in some cases even lead to the foundation of quite successful start-up companies, mostly in the area of miniaturized bioanalytics.

(2) During the research programs mentioned above, we established long-lasting collaborations with industrial partners.

(3) The interdisciplinarity between engineering and fundamental sciences inspires us in this field of research.

(4) Micro/nanotechnologies have many possibilities to interact with colleagues from life sciences or medicine. Especially single cell analytics and quantifications of cellular signaling networks in living cells are fields where miniaturization opens up possibilities to solve questions which are impossible to resolve with traditional approaches.

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