With over 35 years at Drexel as a professor in the Physics Department and an administrator in the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Shyamalendu (Sam) Bose is one of the longest serving and most respected members of the Drexel community. In addition to his work as a professor, Dr. Bose has worked extensively within the international physics community, and last year headed the International Workshop on Mesoscopic, Nanoscopic and Macroscopic Materials held in Orissa, India.
ASK: Tell me a little about you background. Where are you from? What brought you to Drexel?
Shyamalendu Bose: Well, originally I came from India a long, long time ago. I have my Masters degree from India, and I first came to the United States to do my PhD. I received my PhD from the University of Maryland. After that, I stayed in this country, and was married to an Indian woman. I have three sons who are now all grown. They are all married, and I am a grandfather.
I have been here at Drexel for a long time – since 1970, which makes it 38 years now. I came here as a young faculty member, an assistant professor, in 1970, and went through the process becoming a professor in '82-'83. In between, I was in the Dean's Office for about eight and a half years as an associate dean and a senior associate dean, and in 2000, I came back to the physics department. It was a change to be in the Dean's Office, although I continued teaching during that time and kept my office in the physics department. In fact this has been my office for the last 38 years.
ASK: What has been the primary focus of your research and teaching?
Bose: I was what you would call a "solid state" or "condensed matter" physicist, which means I deal with mundane things like properties of metals or solids and things like electronics and microscopics. Also, I am a theorist, which means that I don't do experimental work. Instead, what I've tried to do throughout my life is be engaged with research that is contemporary with what other people are doing, or try to explain others' unexplained experimental work. As a theorist, sometimes I will predict some results and others will perform experiments to confirm that what I've said is correct. Over the years, I have moved on, of course, from one subject within the field to another to another and so on.
Where I first started my research was on electronic properties of metals – how electrons and their interactions change the properties of systems. Also, I've worked with disordered systems, which involve, instead of a regular area of atoms, putting in some other material and seeing how that affects the properties of the system.
More recently, I've moved on to high-temperature superconductors, and when these were discovered back in the late 1980s, we organized a huge conference on the topic. During this time, many other physicists and I began to try to explain a number of issues that arose necessarily from the new experimental discoveries that were taking place. Then we entered the age of nanomaterials. For example, you may have heard of fullerenes1 or buckyballs2, and once they were discovered, I began to study them – exploring their electronic properties. After this came so-called nanotubes, which are basically fullerenes extended into a tube, and these are all made of carbon materials similar to graphite, although on a nanoscopic scale.
Most recently, I have become involved in nanoshells, which are similar in makeup, but obviously the materials are oriented into a shell instead of a tube. Now these have many applications especially in the medical sciences, and offer enormous potential for things like the treatment of tumors.
ASK: What was your involvement in the International Workshop on Mesoscopic, Nanoscopic and Macroscopic Materials?
Bose: I was one of the organizers of this event. In 2000, before I came back to the physics department to resume teaching full-time, I took a sabbatical, and I spent some time in India as well as in Germany. During this time, I spent some time with and collaborated with the director of institute in India, and since then we have kept in close contact and published some papers together that came out of our collaboration. Last year, I was in India and we talked about how nanomaterials, nanotechnology, and nanoscience have become so important, and we decided that we would organize a conference in India because, although there are people working in these fields there, many people, especially young people, didn't have much of an exposure to it. Because of this, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a conference, so that people from this country, India, Germany, Austria, Australia, and all over the world could get together. We thought about the conference in a way which structured it so that people had the chance to both discuss and share their ideas with others in the field and also allow them to interact with the young people back in India. It took place early this year, in January, and it turned out really well. Drexel was one of the sponsors of the event, and our department contributed a little bit of money, but the university got a tremendous amount of publicity back in India because of it. The event was featured in Indian newspapers, and I was interviewed by the local television stations, which got Drexel's name all over the place.
ASK: What were the purposes and goals of the workshop?
Bose: Well because of the amount of research being done around the world on nanomaterials, we felt that it was important to bring people in the field together to specifically discuss them. I mean nanomaterials are being tailor made, specially designed, and can come from both organic and inorganic materials, so because of the scope of the field, talks were given on all sorts of aspects of nanoscience. Overall, I think the conference was a terrific success for all those involved, including Drexel and our department.
ASK: Although nanotechnology is still a relatively new field, is it currently being used in any sort of practical applications? Also, what can be expected for the future?
Bose: One of the areas, in which this technology is being tested and shows great potential, is in medicine. Much of the technology is still very new, so we are still studying the microscopic and nanoscopic properties of nanoshells. For example, these nanoshells are being injected, not into human beings, but into mice and other research animals. Basically, what is happening is that nanoshells are being injected into tumors anywhere in the body, and once they are functionalized, they grow and attach themselves to the tumor. From there, [scientists] shine electromagnetic light, not in the visible spectrum, but infrared light with a high frequency, which is absorbed by the tissue of the tumor. This is important because as the light is absorbed, the cells become excited and have higher kinetic energy and as they come down from this excited state, heat is produced, which in turn kills cancer cells.
Now nanotubes, which I have also worked with a great deal, have very interesting properties that could be very useful. Because they are very sturdy and have high tensile strength, but are also very flexible and can bend and then return to their shape, people are experimenting with ways to use them in manufacturing. Now this is still a long way off because at this point they are very hard and expensive to produce. However, in the future when they can be manufactured rather cheaply, you could build, for example, the body of a car out of materials with nanotubes, which would be essentially dent-proof because of their flexibility and ability to keep their original shape. This same concept could also be applied on a larger scale to produce earthquake-proof buildings. Because the nanomaterials are so strong and can retain their shape, a building could move back-and-forth, but it would eventually return to its original shape.
Really though, because the technology is so new and based on the fact that we've already come up with so many applications, the possibilities right now are really unlimited. Although I work more on the research side and understanding there basic properties, work is being done elsewhere in the university, like in engineering, to find practical applications for these materials.
1Fullerenes are a group of molecules composed entirely of carbon, and which can exist in a number of different forms.
2Buckyballs are the common name for a fullerenes that take spherical form.
