Call for industry interest: Nanofabulous Winter Workshop 2018
The Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) is holding an industry-focused technical workshop.
Pick and choose from three full days of seminars and practical sessions held at MCN, the headquarters of the Australian National Fabrication Facility’s Victorian Node (ANFF-Vic) and the largest open-access cleanroom facility in the Southern Hemisphere.
Help to make this workshop exactly what you want.
Please click this link and complete the survey before April 30.
Meet ANFF VIC at the Biomelbourne Network breakfast
BioMelbourne Network is hosting a breakfast event on 12 April at CSIRO’s Biomedical Materials Translational Facility (BMTF). There will be three talks given – two senior members of the ANFF VIC team will be speaking, followed by a tour of the BMTF.
ANFF VIC Director Professor Nico Voelcker will discuss his group’s work on silicon nanowires for drug delivery.
Professor Sally McArthur, a member of the ANFF VIC collaboration committee, will present her latest research on 4D cell culture systems for evaluating biomaterials.
Professor Susie Nilsson, a CSIRO Research+ leader will also be speaking, taking a look at the use of small molecules to rapidly mobilise marrow stem cells.
There will also be a number of MCN/ANFF VIC staff present at the meeting, come and find us!
The Image of the Year winner is…
Twitter has had its say – almost 100 people voted through @Nanomelb to choose the ANFF VIC Image of the Year.
Congratulations to Sara Ghavamian who won over voters to bring home the $200 prize with her image “Keeper”, taken using MCN’s Scanning Electron Microscope.
Sara is a Monash University researcher working with Dr Victor Cadarso and Dr Iain Hay. The image comes from research into whether topographic nanostructures can be used to help create an environmentally-friendly antibacterial layer which could then be used in hospitals, or as an antifouling surface on ships.
Explaining the choice of name, Sara said: “The small round object trapped in between the spikes of the features resembles a goalkeeper holding a ball under their arm.”
The image was taken during an assisted session with MCN Process Engineer Dr Guangyuan Si who helped to image the surface.
View the full shortlist below.
Stella Aslanoglou and Qianqian Shi
The gold nanocube plasmene sits on top of Si nanowires. This is an image that combines a "soft" plasmene and "hard" Si nanowires. When they meet with each other, both of them maintained their own characteristics: the Si nanowires provide supporting while the ultra-thin plasmene keeps flat on the tips without any structure collapse and shows a semi-transparent feature.
This image was taken using MCN's FIB-SEM.
Kate Fox and Alastair Stacey
Diamond coated 3D printed titanium cubes, coated using the MCN PCD diamond CVD equipment (credit K Fox and A Stacey). These cubes are part of a submitted article entitled "Polycrystalline Diamond Coating of Additively Manufactured Titanium for Biomedical Applications".
Bowen Zhu
Gold nanowires synthesized on silicon substrates via solution approach at room temperature. They formed a structure resemble a piece of broccoli.
Image taken using MCN's FEI Helios NanoLab 600 Dual Beam.
Sara Ghavamian (Gholam Nejad)
The small round object trapped in between the spikes of the feature resembles a goalkeeper holding a ball under their arm. My surfaces are designed to investigate the antibacterial properties of patterned substrates and are imaged at MCN using NOVA FEG-SEM tool. The original mould was fabricated using photolithography but the visualized surfaces are PDMS (half-way replicated) or OrmoComp (fully replicated).
ANFF VIC Publication of the Year announced
Research carried out by Dr Daniel Langley and colleagues based at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Sciences (LIMS) has been selected as the 2017 ANFF VIC Publication of the Year.
The research team’s paper Optical Chemical Barcoding Based on Polarization Controlled Plasmonic Nanopixels was chosen as the winner by ANFF VIC’s selection panel due to its impact, pioneering nature and level of engagement with MCN.
Daniel Peter Langley, Eugeniu Balaur, Yongsop Hwang, Catherine Sadatnajafi, and Brian Abbey are all mentioned as authors, and the group will be awarded a $200 cash prize.
The team was investigating the combination of microfluidics with plasmonic devices to create a chemical sensor by monitoring changes in refractive index. The optical sensors are tunable, and can therefore cover a broad range of indices, whilst maintaining a high sensitivity within the visible spectrum.
Different chemicals and compounds have different refractive indices so – once a library of “chemical barcodes” is assembled – the devices can be used to detect different chemicals in a sample quickly and in a non-destructive fashion by comparing the new data from the unidentified chemical with the signatures of known substances.
The team used MCN’s E-beam deposition equipment to deposit chrome and silver on quartz wafers, FIB-SEM to pattern nanoscale apertures in metal films and a Microspectroscope to analyse the spectral output of devices at different polarisations of light.
View the original publication here.
ANFF VIC publications in 2017
All papers that were published in 2017 that correctly acknowledged MCN/ANFF VIC were eligible for selection in this year’s Publication of the Year competition. The near 150 papers were whittled down to a shortlist, where Daniel and the team’s paper crept ahead of an incredibly strong field.
In addition to qualifying for the ANFF VIC publication competition, papers that correctly acknowledge MCN are entitled to a $200 user credit that is added to future project funds at the Centre. Authors of papers that are used on the cover of peer-reviewed journals can claim an additional $500 user credit. Click here for more information.
In total, the incentive scheme has handed out $18,000 in user credits to be used at MCN. In 2017 alone, $8,500 was claimed by just 18 MCN/ANFF VIC users.
