Careers in Nanotechnology

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are the study and application of extremely small things and can be used across the other science fields, such as chemistry, biology, physics, materials science, and engineering. By extremely small I mean... extremely small... a sheet of paper is 100 000 nanometers thick. If the diameter of a marble was one nanometer, then one meter would be the size of the earth.

The field of nanotechnology originated from a talk by Richard Feynman in 1959 called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". The name "nanotechnology" was coined in 1974 by professor Norio Taniguchi from the Tokyo Science University. Today, scientists are able to take advantage of the enhanced properties that materials made at the nanoscale have over their conventional counterparts, such as, higher strength, lighter weight, increased control of light spectrum, and greater chemical reactivity. Research in nanotechnology has even made your golf balls fly straighter. A group of prostate cancer researchers at the University of Alberta are developing a sort of homing beacons on the nanoscale that can detect and deliver drugs straight to tumors. This expected to be significantly better than chemotherapy, which kills both healthy and cancerous cells. They expect to have an impact on patients in two years. 

It is not necessary to have a PhD in science or engineering to have a career in nanotechnology. he National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network lists different levels of education and expected salaries for these levels of education.