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 |  The most interesting thing in the world, says University of Michigan professor and dirt biker Anna Stefanopoulou," is balancing trade-offs to control complex systerns."Stefanopoulou works on electronic valves that could boost the fuel economy of conventional car engines by an estimated 10 percent and make practical exotic designs that are 30 percent more fuel efficient and free of nitrogen oxide emissions. A conventional engine regulates power with a throttle that controls airflow into cylinders; the timing of valves stays mechanically fixed. But the timing of electronic valves can vary infinitely, allowing the engine to "gain torque so fast it can break the crankshaft," Stefanopoulou says. The native of Greece is developing such controls using sophisticated mathematical modeling, while high-end car companies "rely more on intuition," says her Michigan colleague Jessy Grizzle. Stefanopoulou is also devising automated gears that would use engine compression to brake vehicles. She was already mod-eling the control of cars powered by fuel cells when the Bush administration dismantled an initiative to develop hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles—in favor of fuel cell power.
| | STEFANOPOULOU | | ANNA | | AGE 33 | | TRANSPORTATION | | UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN |
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| | |  Hendrik Schon is reinventing the transistor at the place it was bom.He and his Bell Labs coworkers have produced single-molecule transistors whose electrical performance is comparable to that of today's best silicon devices but which are hundreds of times smaller. Making such molecular transistors, which could lead to ultrafast, ultrasmall computers, has been a goal of researchers for years; SchOn's clever design established Bell Labs as a leader in the race. But Schon is not interested in simply reinventing the transistor. He wants to change the very materials that form microelectronics, replacing inorganic semiconductors with organic molecules. Schon has made an organic high-temperature superconductor, renewing hopes that superconductors could have widespread electronic applications. He also helped devise the first electrically driven organic laser, which could mean cheaper optoelectronic devices.The soft-spoken Schon recalls being"very surprised''by how well his molecular transis-tors worked. But it won't be a surprise if Schon helps transform microelectronics.
| | SCHON | | JAN HENDRIK | | AGE 31 | | NANOTECHNOLOGY | | LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES' BELL LABS |
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| | |  Expect big things from Keith Schwab. Just don't expect to hear much about them. Schwab has advanced quantum physics with two seminal discoveries:At the University of California, Berkeley, he devised ways to exploit the quirky quantum behavior of a fric-tionless fluid called superfluid, which could lead to a superaccurate gyroscope, important for space navigation and to measure minute changes in the earth's rotation.Then.at Caltech, he became the first to measure the fundamental unitofheatflow.aconstantthat will limit nanoscale devices.That discovery
was the subject of film maker Toni Sherwood's 2000 documentary The Uncertainty Principle. Popular at film festivals. Schwab lowered his profile when he joined the tight-lipped National Security Agency's quantum computing initiative in College Park, MD. Its goal: a quantum computer, which could have unpar-alleled code-breaking power. Schwab is also building nanoscalc machines to demonstrate
another of physics' bizarre properties: super-position, a particle's ability to exist in two places at once. Schwab's work is unclassified—for now.
| | SCHWAB | | KEITH | | AGE 33 | | NANOTECHNOLOGY | | NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY |
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| | |  David Schaffer spends most of his time making things grow: in his garden, orchids; in his lab, stem cells.The biomedical engineer is trying to coax stem cells that lie nearly dormant in the brain to multiply at a much quicker rate than they ordinarily do, which could help regenerate damaged nerve tissue in patients with Aizheimer's or Parkinson's diseases. Last year Schaffer and his colleagues discovered a protein that causes stem cells to grow, and he showed that the protein's action could trigger the repair of nerve cells in mice. By determining how the protein works, Schaffer maybe able to get neural stem cells in human patients to replace damaged neurons.To carry the protein to stem cells, Schaffer is using inactivated viruses as delivery vans and is now tinkering with their molecular properties to help them find their targets precisely. Schaffer's background equipped him well for his work; he grew up in a family of doctors, was interested in mathemat-ics and majored in engineering. Prodding stem cells to grow is harder than cultivating orchids, but the potential rewards are richer, too.
| | SCHAFFER | | DAVID | | AGE 31 | | MEDICINE | | UNIVERSITY OF CALFORNIA,BERKELEY |
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| | |  "Right now we have no way of saying/Give me a drug candidate, then give me a list of every protein in the human body it interacts with,'" says David Sabatini, whose mellow demeanor is more characteristic of a jazz guitarist than a molecular biologist." But my technology can do that." The payoff, he says, could be better drug design. His technology is a glass chip, essentially a microscope slide, spotted with several thousand mammalian cells. Each spot of cells makes a different protein; researchers can wash a potential drug over the slide to see how it interacts with thousands of proteins at once. In the past, testing all those proteins might have taken months. Today a patent on the chip is pending, and Sabatini has raked in $6.5 mil- lion in capital for his Cambridge, MA, startup, Akceli. But drug screening is only one appli- cation: Sabatini aims to make a cell-based chip that will allow researchers to study every protein encoded in the human genome at once. He says his chip could allow researchers to identify the mutated genes that lead to disease.
| | SABATINI | | DAVID | | AGE 33 | | BIOTECHNOLOGY | | WHITEHAD INSTITUTE FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH |
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| | |  John Santini knows all about managing chronic illnesses; he was diagnosed with lupus at age 12 and has been taking daily medication since. Small wonder he chose to pursue drug delivery technology. Today Santini is chief scientific officer of Micro Chips. Which he cofounded in 1999 to make pills and injections obsolete. The Cambridge, MA, company is developing an implantable chip that stores drugs and releases them at a programmed rate. Santini devised the technology as an MIT grad student. A dime-sized, surgically replaceable chip can hold several hundred single-dose drug reservoirs-Patients could control the chip's microprocessor remotely—a benefit for, say, patients taking pain medications. Microchips recently began testing the chip with an undisclosed drug. Santini's technology could be ideal for delivering new protein drugs. Most proteins must be injected into the blood- stream because they are too fragile to survive the digestive system. But an implanted chip could replace such injections. And with the sequencing of the human genome, Santini says,
"There's going to be an explosion in protein compounds in the next five to 10 years."
| | SANTINI | | JOHN | | AGE 29 | | MEDICINE | | MICROCHIPS |
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| | |  People often ask Lisa Su why she works for IBM—after all, aren't startups where the glamour is? Su's response: "l can run a group that's like a startup, yet I have the resources available at IBM." Her Emerging Products group focuses on low-power and broadband semiconductors as well as biochips. Its first product is a microprocessor that improves battery life in handheld assistants and cell phones. Su hired the group's 10 employees and says their role is to develop broadband products that will "give my morn instant, unlimited access to information, anytime, anywhere, in any form. "After joining IBM in 1995,Su, who has a PhD in electrical engineering, played a critical role in integrating copper connections into semiconductor chips, solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production. The technology, unveiled in 1998, led to chips that were 10 to 20 percent faster than those with conventional aluminum connections. Su showed she had management acumen and was allowed to start Emerging Products. "Lisa became an IBM executive in five years," says colleague Scottie Ginn, "quicker than anyone I've ever seen."
| | SU | | LISA | | AGE 32 | | HARDWARE | | IBM |
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| | |  Inside an airliner, vibration frays a tiny piece of insulation, exposing an electrical wire; an arc of electricity ignites vaporized fuel—and a disaster. That's what investigators suspect caused the \996 explosion of TWA Flight 800. Electrical engineer Steven Shaw wants to make sure it doesn't happen again. While
pursuing his PhD, Shaw wrote algorithms that allow sensors to interpret minute
fluctuations along every electrical line in an aircraft or building. This information can help building managers find faulty equipment or wiring and help airplane inspectors pinpoint electrical malfunctions—before problems turn deadly. Now a professor at Montana State University, Shaw is equally adept at theoriz-ing, coding and working in the machine shop. The California Energy Commission is testing
Shaw's advanced load-monitoring systems on several state buildings. Better information about electrical flow can help building managers decide when to fire up backup batteries, fuel cells or expensive gas turbines.
| | SHAW | | STEVEN | | AGE 28 | | ENERGY | | MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY |
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| | |  When Tom Soh was a Stanford University graduate student, his focus was scholarly: to push the envelope in nanotechnology research. Things have changed since he arrived at Lucent Techno logies' Belt Labs. Soh heads optical microelectronic mechanical devel- opment at Lucent spin off Agere Systems, in Allentown, PA. His task is to make optical communications systems more efficient and intelligent, His group's first success was a microelectronic mechanical switching device that routes fiber-optic signals without converting them to electronic form and then back to optical. Those conversions cause the biggest bottlenecks in today's telecom systems, and Soh's optical switch offers huge gains in speed and capacity. Agere began large-scale production in March 2002, after it received significant orders from top customers. Soh has since led development of another product, the optical add/drop multi-plexer, which allows light-wave transmissions to be added or dropped at critical nodes without electronic conversion. Currently overseeing 12 engineers, Soh believes great things can be achieved with team chemistry.
| | SOH | | TOM HYONGSOK | | AGE 32 | | TELECOMMUNICATIONS | | AGERE SYSTEMS |
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| | |  Vivek Subramanian is an inventor's inventor. His credits include a novel memory chip that led him to start Santa Clara, CA-based Matrix Semiconductor; a tiny, award-winning tran-sistor; and his current project, ultracheap, flex-ible displays for note-taking gadgets. But his greatest ambition is to put small amounts of
computing power into everyday items-Subra-manian has devised radio frequency sensors that can be printed onto the plastic and paper that wrap fresh foods and packaged goods in stores. He's confident his University of California, Berkeley, group can produce the circuits for less than one cent each—compared with the cur-
rent manufacturing cost of one dollar for a conventional radio frequency tag. Such tags on gro-cery items could give shoppers price and content information, even on-the-spot discounts. A sensor in a carton of milk could measure lactic-acid levels and signal when it's time for a fresh container. 'I'm not looking to make the best and fastest electronic devices, "Subramanian says. "I'm just making them good and fast enough so they can be placed everywhere in everything."
| | SUBRAMANIAN | | VIVEK | | AGE 30 | | MATERIALS | | UNIVERSITY OF CALFORNIA, BERKELEY |
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| | |  The human immune system defends against foreign objects with vigilance, but Kevin Shakesheff wants to create lasting peace between synthetic surfaces and the biological world. He is building polymer scaffolds,on which living cells can grow,to form the back- bones of what will one day be transplant-ready organs, as well as drug delivery vehicles that can steer themselves to target sites.That work began when the pharmaceutical sciences graduate spent a year in the lab of MIT bioengineering pioneer Robert Langer. He returned to the University of Nottingham in his native England to start his own lab.There,Shakesheff figured out how to incorporate stem cells as well as support cells that he calls the "unsung heroes" of tissue regeneration into biodegradable polymer structures for organs. Shakesheff is now using the technique to develop small polymer capsules that can deliver human cells to injury sites. Last year, the hard-working Shakesheff founded Regentec in Nottingham to
commercialize his work. He's forging agreements with pharmaceutical companies to mass-produce miniature tissue and organ samples for drug testing.
| | SHAKESHEFF | | KEVIN | | AGE 32 | | MATERIALS | | UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM |
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Source From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
June 2002
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產業智庫 
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