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SINGAPORE, Feb. 17, 2004 — At the age of 36, Jackie Ying already had an enviable nine-year career in the chemical engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But a year ago, rather than remain in a comfortable professorship at MIT, she decided to take on a whole new project. Ying went to the opposite side of the world to help nanotechnology develop in Asia.
Ying, for almost a year now, has headed Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, a government-supported research center that opened in March 2002.
“My responsibilities are certainly different, but it was not a dramatic change for me, culturally,” Ying said.
Before Ying came on board, the center was simply the Institute of Bioengineering. At Ying’s insistence, the government decided to include nanotechnology in the institute’s mission. As its name implies, the institute focuses on biomedical nanotech applications. Ying said the institute will commercialize a number of nanotechnology projects within the next two years:
- Wound dressing: Two of the institute’s researchers, Yang Yi Yan and Wang Li Shan, have created a transparent wound dressing using nanostructured materials. A thin film made of special polymers allows air and moisture to circulate freely between the wound and the open air. The wound is still protected from bacterial infection, accelerating the healing process. Because the dressing is transparent, doctors can better assess when it should be removed. “The membrane’s nanoscale design also allows the inclusion of nanoparticles that can be used in drug delivery,” Ying said.
Glucose monitor: Another team of researchers at the institute has developed an ultrasensitive biosensor that can monitor blood glucose levels in diabetes patients. The sensor includes a disposable test strip made of a nanoparticulate membrane. With the biosensor, patients would no longer need to draw blood from large arteries. Only a very small amount would be needed to get a reading.
Ying said she enjoys steering research in Singapore, where she’s “in a bigger pond, affecting more fishes.” Since coming aboard 10 months ago, she has seen the research staff grow from 20 to 100, and that number is expected to grow to 250 in the next two years.
In Singapore, Ying is closer to her roots. Born in Taiwan, Ying was raised in Singapore and New York and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from The Cooper Union in New York in 1987. Ying’s interest in nanotechnology began when she was a Ph.D. student at Princeton, where she studied materials science. She then went to Germany on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for New Materials in Saarbrucken, working under the wings of Herbert Gleiter, a pioneer in nanostructured materials.
Mildred Dresselhaus, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and physics, said that she is confident in Ying’s ability to make further contributions to nanotechnology in Singapore.
“Jackie’s a bit of a tiger and she’s a very aggressive manager,” Dresselhaus said. “It takes a while to set up a lab, but if anyone could manage something like that, I think Jackie would be the right person.”
Ying said she finds it exciting to be in a place where biotechnology research is a hot area of study for young people, thanks to an islandwide government effort to promote biotech. The institute also does a fair amount of educating students about nanotech applications, having launched a youth research program in October that introduces students and teachers to bioengineering and nanotechnology. In February, a group of high schoolers and junior college teachers will work with institute researchers to design classroom experiments.
“Our aim is to expose as many young people as we can to the immense possibilities available in biomedical research,” Ying said.