Project Summary

The Intellectual Merit of the Proposed Activity …

There is a broad consensus across mulitple disciplines that nanotechnology represents a paradigm breaking framework of knowledge. For some participants in nanoscale research and technologies, it has even become an accepted premise that nanotechnology represents a plausible shift in the nature of what it will mean to be a human being, as life extension and even immortality receive plausible consideration by mulitple major players. There is also a strong consensus that past such paradigmatic changes - e.g. the introduction of print culture to human ecologies - introduced wide ranging and even evolutionary transformations into human culture. How should we prepare for the volatilites, uncertainties and opportunities that inevitably but unpredictably attend even the perception of such transformations in knowledge and technologies? We seek to evolve a highly interactive and open community of teaching and research for the investigation and evaluation of the space of all possible transformations of the human environment through nanoscale science and technologies. NSF funding, spread over two years, will serve as seed money for connecting stake holders and participants in emerging nanotechnology at a major research university active in the incubation of different nanotechnological futures. As a catalyst for the creation of a multi-leveled and multidisciplinary community devoted to the ongoing investigation of this enormous space of ethical, social, environmental, human, economic and even unknown transformations augured by nanotechnology, NSF funding will yield two permanent interdisciplinary courses that will be sustainable as regularly offered courses by the second year. The main focus of this bootstrapping of a community adequate to mapping these nanotransformations is an upper division 3-credit course that uses design to integrate the R&D of nano science and technology with analysis and reflective reasoning drawn from disciplines in the liberal arts. It will explicitly generate a student mediated, two way dialogue between researchers in nano R&D and scholars in the humanities through student teams who study the social, human and ethical (SHE) impacts of the nanotechnology research, existing or planned, of the team mentors. The second course creates a one credit first year pipeline that echoes the content of the first course while raising engineering students' awareness of the extraordinary potential of nanoscience and technology (S&T), and of the opportunities for career development such as the Minor in Nanotechnology at Penn State. Penn State thus hopes to offer a model community of teaching and research in the space of nanotransformations to be borrowed and transformed by other benchmark universities, towards the goal of evolving local and global communities worthy of this urgent deliberation and discussion in the context of possible human ontological change. The courses use engineering design as the appropriate modality for understanding the impacts of nanotechnology on society, asking our students and ourselves, in short: What kind of planet do we wish to design and grow?

Research will yield multiple conference presentations around the planet in association with one PI's activity in the creation of global international standards, as well as a scholarly book manuscript about standardization and emerging technologues.

The Broader Impacts Resulting from the Proposed Activity …

For dissemination, we will use a circles of impact approach to dissemination. In the inner circle, the teams will be generating studies of the social, human, and ethical (SHE) impact of the nanotechnology research and development work of their mentor. These studies then will immediately reach into nano research engines helping the researchers understand, plan, and fund their research with more awareness of concerns and insights from multiple disciplines. They, in turn, will inform their research peers elsewhere, and the NSF program managers and reviewers through the proposals, articles and book manuscripts that they write. In this way it impacts the development and management of nanotechnology. In the next circle the two courses will impact the consciousness of the wider faculty and students bodies of the university and draw increasing numbers into the world of nano S&T while growing a local and global community for making wiser decisions in the deployment of nanotechnology. In this way it helps to populate the workforce in nanotechnology research and design. For those who do not move into nano careers, the course will provide an ongoing online and local community devoted to understanding and evaluating nanotechnology. Some of these may go into careers in business, law, politics and government agencies where their understanding of nanotechnology may be very helpful. The project website, with the team studies and the course curricula, will allow others to gain the benefits nationally and globally. Finally, through conference and journal publications, we hope to influence the way nanotechnology is taught and studied in engineering and STS. The student mediated model proposed, if successful , could have application in many other research areas. We will also be very interested in pursuing further funding for such activities as REUs and global exchanges if we get the initial funding.

 Create your own educational wiki!Support Community Add to Del.ici.ous Add to Digg Add to Reddit Add to fUrl Add to SpurlPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS