The decade-long thaw in relations between Russia and the United States has finally reached nanotechnology.
In Silicon Valley, for example, a law firm and a Russian business consultant are producing a Russian American Technology Investment Showcase on Tuesday in Menlo Park, Calif. The event will feature Russian small tech leaders such as Oleg Khasanov, director of the Siberian Research and Development Centre Spectr in Tomsk.
At the same time, a scientist at Motorola Inc. in Arizona is juggling an overflow of people lining up to attend Nano and Giga Challenges in Microelectronics Sept. 10-13 at the historic Palace of Science in Moscow.
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“This is the time for Russian technology to be discovered,” said Natalia Troufanova, a former administrator with the Russian Federation who is heading the technology showcase in Silicon Valley.
Troufanova, who now lives in San Francisco, directed an emergency import/export program while Russia was undergoing its political and economic transformation in the 1990s. She has seen interest in Russian technology surge after a combination of global events beginning last year with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visits to the United States. A turning point was Sept. 11. That day was a “shock that opened some minds,” Troufanova said.
“Relations between Russia, the United States and Europe are taking on a fundamentally different nature — a whole new international order is emerging and Russia is playing a significant role in shaping it.”
The technology showcase is only a first step. “We have ambitious plans to establish the Russian Innovation Council in Silicon Valley right away,” Trufanova said.
“This is truly a grass-roots effort,” said Jerry Joondeph, a partner with Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. The Palo Alto, Calif., law firm, which has an office in Moscow, is working with the Russian Venture Capital Association (RVCA), based in St. Petersburg. The RVCA will host its Third Russian Venture Fair Oct. 17-18.
Recent meetings between Presidents Bush and Putin have put Russian-American technology cooperation on the agenda, said Aleksey Yegortsev, a San Francisco-based trade representative for the Russian Federation. “It’s a beginning,” he said, adding that the two nations still need to overcome some Cold War-era restrictions against sharing of technology.
“A major sea change occurred on 9/11 when President Putin decided to ally himself with the U.S. and the West on terrorism,” said Sig Hecker, senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “That changed the relationship (between the United States and Russia) at higher levels.” But Hecker also said that Russia’s security services “still hold a close grip on the scientific establishment.”
Anatoli Korkin also has noticed the change in attitude. Korkin, originally from Russia, is a senior scientist at Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector in Mesa, Ariz. He also is co-chair of the organizing and technical program committee for the September symposium in Moscow.
“When we first organized the conference we asked ourselves, ‘Who will want to go to Russia?’ Now it’s ‘who doesn’t want to come?’,” Korkin said. The crowd is expected to reach the maximum capacity of 500 people, he said.
What started out as a workshop Motorola agreed to sponsor has grown to the scale of what Korkin described as an “international congress.”
The event includes 56 speakers from Russia, Ireland, Belgium, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, Estonia and Finland. Topics range from quantum computing to atom removal for fabrication of nanostructures.
Working with Jan Labanowski, a computational chemist with the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus, organizers have developed an extensive Web site. Labanowski said he plans to put 200 abstracts on the site. “We hope this will be a resource for people,” he said.
Sponsors include the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Ted Turner, vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn founded NTI last year as a charitable organization working to prevent the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Evgeny Velikhov, president of the Russian Research Centre Kurchatov Institute, and Andreas Wild, director of the DigitalDNA lab with Motorola, Germany, are co-chairs for the symposium.
“It’s very exciting to help my company to build productive relationships,” said Korkin, who has lived outside Russia since 1991. “The relationship between the United States and Russia is going strongly in a positive direction.”
“Russia has been the developer of such key nanotech innovations as quantum dots. Yet their arcane patent/publishing procedures have caused them to not get the credit they deserve,” said Mark Modzelewski, founder of the U.S.-based NanoBusiness Alliance.
He noted robust nanoscience programs at several Russian universities, along with the Russian Society of Scanning Probe Microscopy and Nanotechnology, headquartered in Moscow.
“Russia is definitely one of the five global leaders in nanotech,” Modzelewski said, “along with the United States, China, Japan, and Switzerland.”