Talking over a cup of coffee at the UNM Bookstore, Stefi Weisburd points to a single strand of her hair, explaining that the width of that hair contains about 100,000 nanometers. She said on the scale of a nanometer – one billionth of a meter – physical forces act differently than they do at the macroscopic level.
Photo: Stefi Weisburd, outreach coordinator, Center for High Technology Materials
Last August, Weisburd became the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network outreach coordinator at the Center for High Technology Materials, an interdisciplinary research center affiliated with the UNM School of Engineering. She coordinates educational outreach to teachers and students at elementary, middle and high schools throughout New Mexico.
Weisburd organizes three-day workshops which combine lectures and hands-on activities to show teachers how researchers exploit the strange ways forces act in nanomaterials. For example, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Dirk leads teachers through an experiment with an alginate polymer to demonstrate how she uses polymeric materials to re-grow bone in her research.
Weisburd said that while people are aware of nanotechnology in computers and cell phones, the biological applications are less well-known. “Where I think the biggest impact is going to be is nanomedicine.”
Through the Integrated Graduate Education Research and Training program, Weisburd and graduate fellows visit middle and elementary schools to foster an appreciation for nanotechnology.
In one exercise, students fill two mugs with water – one ordinary-sized and one tiny – and then turn them upside down. The water in the regular mug pours out, but the water in the tiny mug stays put. The exercise demonstrates that on the smaller scale, surface attraction to the mug and between water molecules becomes stronger than gravity.
Weisburd is organizing a nanocamp for both students and teachers June 23-July 11 at Albuquerque Academy. Exercises include using hydrophobic nanomaterials – those repelling water – to solve a crime scene and making stained glass with nanoparticles.
Weisburd studied physics at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. She’s been an analyst for Congress and an editor at Science News magazine.
When her daughter – now a student at Carnegie Mellon University – was born, Weisburd switched to freelancing. She also returned to another of her early passions – poetry.
“My father’s a poet,” she said. “Before I knew how to write, my mother would write down my poems for me.”
Two books of Weisburd’s poetry were recently published: “The Wind-Up Gods” and “Barefoot: Poems for Naked Feet,” a collection for children.
She said poet and psychoanalyst Ruth Danon described “The Wind-Up Gods” exactly: “These poems are about a woman who wants to live in a predictable world of Newtonian mechanics but is forced to live in a quantum mechanical relativistic world.”
This marriage of science and poetry seems like a natural fit for Weisburd. “I’m not religious, yet I’m still in so much awe of nature. Science provides a ‘wow’ factor,” she said.
Media Contact: Sari Krosinsky, (505) 277-1593; email: michal@unm.edu