International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) at Northwestern University

09/08/2026

The final episode of the Nanoscape Summer Listening List, #9.

Ryan Truby wants to build robots that learn from biology, not by copying it exactly, but by taking its best lessons. Muscles, for instance. Natural muscle scales from the size of a tardigrade to a blue whale. It's back-drivable, meaning the environment can push back against it. It's distributed throughout the body. No motor we've ever built comes close.

His lab at Northwestern is working on artificial muscles powered by electric fields and light, soft materials that process information the way biological tissue does, and 3D-printed robotic components cheap enough that a high schooler could print them at home. The goal, eventually, is a robot that can enter a disaster zone, climb through rubble, or help an aging patient, without needing to simulate the entire world first.

"The future is far more interesting than it might be scary," he told us.

That's our summer. Thanks for listening along!

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you pod: https://bit.ly/4gPStQM

08/25/2026

Registration is now open for the 2026 IIN Rosemary Schnell Symposium, "Lights, Nano, Action! Where Light, Matter, and Innovation Take Center Stage."

Thursday, October 15, 2026 | Hilton Orrington Hotel, Evanston, Illinois | 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

This is a rare opportunity to hear high-caliber scientists, some of whom infrequently present in the United States. The program includes a poster session and closing reception. Admission is free for all attendees.

Register: https://bit.ly/4qwXORq

08/24/2026

The Nanoscape Summer Listening List, #7.

Julia Kalow is a Northwestern chemist who studied creative writing, reads about a book a week, and uses light to switch soft materials from rubber-band stiff to silly-putty fluid and back.

"Writing is thinking," she says. Working through a proposal on the page is where the real ideas happen. She runs her lab the same way: when a manuscript is ready, the first author reads it out loud while the group listens. She also has some thoughts on generative AI and what it means for the writing process.

The conversation ranges from light-controlled hydrogels to a 1985 science fiction novel that came within two years of predicting CAR T cancer therapy. Any result that surprises her, she says, is the most fun to follow up on.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you pod: https://bit.ly/4xQlt1y

08/17/2026

The Nanoscape Summer Listening List continues with pick #6.

When Nicholas Peppas arrived at MIT in 1971, the artificial kidney was a piece of equipment that filled a room. Patients came to the machine. He always thought it should be the other way around. That conviction, that medicine could work at the molecular level and that nanotechnology was the natural answer, has driven his work for 55 years.

He was also, for much of his life, a serious musician. He'll tell you the two things are not as separate as they sound. His CDs of classical music sit behind him in his office at UT Austin, his other life, as he calls it.

IIN honored him with the 2025 Kabiller Prize, the world's largest monetary award in nanoscience and nanomedicine. He's been doing the work since long before anyone was giving out prizes for it.

What stays with us is a story he tells near the end of the conversation. Twenty-eight years ago, a patient whose sight was restored through a lens his lab helped develop grabbed his hands and said "you gave me my life back." He's never forgotten it. Neither will you.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you pod: https://bit.ly/4g3UUQJ

08/10/2026

The blood-brain barrier isn't the only locked door the body puts up. Right now, surgery is the only way to actually diagnose endometriosis, another kind of locked door standing between patients and answers.

On the newest episode of Nanoscape, "Sneaking Past the Body's Most Locked Door," Emily Day talks about nanoparticles built to get past both.

New episode is out now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Give it a listen here: https://bit.ly/4qc4T9Z

08/03/2026

The Nanoscape Summer Listening List, #5.

Ludmilla Aristilde grew up in Haiti with an early passion for the environment. She'll tell you that's where her interest in environmental chemistry started, long before she ever set foot in a lab.

Now at Northwestern, her research starts at the nanoscale and works its way up. To understand why microbes behave the way they do at a large scale, she says, you have to go all the way down to the molecular level. How do the enzymes secreted by bacteria get into plastic, cleave it, and turn it into food? That's the question driving her lab.

Her team has identified the specific enzyme that makes it possible. The work has gotten wide coverage, and Aristilde is careful not to overstate it: these bacteria aren't going to eat the world's plastic on their own. But they possess machinery that scientists can now study, engineer, and potentially scale.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you pod: https://bit.ly/4fWOAcy

07/29/2026

Scientists often need to crystallize a protein before they can determine its structure, but persuading proteins to form usable crystals can be a tedious and unpredictable process.

A paper published today in Science Advances from Chad Mirkin’s lab introduces a new approach. The researchers used flexible DNA strands to guide proteins into precisely engineered crystals with atomic-level order.

Read how the method could give scientists greater control over one of structural biology’s most difficult steps:

Strategy overturns assumption that flexible building blocks cannot produce perfectly ordered crystals.

07/27/2026

The Nanoscape Summer Listening List, #4.

Ted Sargent has a simple answer when you ask him about the greatest success of nanoscience and nanotechnology. It's not a specific discovery or a breakthrough technology. It's the fact that so many researchers around the world are doing it without even calling it that.

Nanoscience, he argues, is now so deeply embedded in engineering, materials science, chemistry, and physics that it's fully baked into curricula and research problems across disciplines. People are doing it without talking about it. And that, to Sargent, is the sign of a field that has truly arrived.

The full conversation goes much further: solar cells, clean energy, CO2 catalysts, and what it actually takes to get a technology out of the lab and into the world.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you pod: https://bit.ly/4ft9Ea0

07/22/2026

Ted Sargent, Randall Snurr, and Omar Farha. Nano leadership at Northwestern, on full display.

Innovation happens through partnership. Northwestern University is excited to join the Genesis Mission Awardee cohort and collaborate with fellow awardees advancing breakthrough research. Our inaugural projects will use AI and advanced computing to accelerate materials discovery, fusion energy, sustainable manufacturing and next-generation microelectronics. Learn more: https://tinyurl.com/a5npv5tb

07/20/2026

The Nanoscape Summer Listening List, #3.

Vinayak Dravid's lab was in the middle of a routine brainstorm when one of his students noticed that their nano-material pouch looked a lot like a tea bag being dipped in a cup. That observation turned into a finding with implications for billions of people: brewed tea leaves can pull toxic metals like lead and chromium out of contaminated water.

The tea bag discovery is just one piece of a larger body of work Dravid describes as "nanoscale solutions to gigaton problems." His OHM sponge soaks up oil spills 25 to 30 times its own weight, can be squeezed out and reused, and is made from repurposed polyurethane foam, the material that gets thrown away every time you open a package. His PEARL media captures phosphate runoff before it reaches the Great Lakes.

As Dravid puts it: "You have small things making a big difference." This one is ideal for a summer afternoon near water, which in the Midwest means you're very close to one of these problems.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you pod: https://bit.ly/4frzhs4