NAKFI Alumni and Leaders
NAKFI Nanotechnology Attendee
Eric Jakobsson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Eric Jakobsson is the Director of the $6.5 million National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors the idea for which, Jakobsson says, “was born at NAKFI” and aided by chance when he and Dr. David LaVan (now a mechanical engineer in the Ceramics Division at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology) were seated next to each other on the plane after the conference. The two were part of the same interdisciplinary team given the challenge to grow a biological in vitro power source on a chip at the NAKFI Nanotechnology conference in 2004. LaVan, who was awarded a seed grant from NAKFI to develop novel materials to convert sunlight into electricity, will oversee design of the biobattery for the Center..

For more information visit http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=2210 and http://www.nanoconductor.org/