Joyce Winslow
jwins@uoregon.edu

"Talk to John Donovan." ... "You should really talk to John Donovan." ..."Have you talked to John Donovan?"

Ask any number of faculty, scientists, and researchers on campus about the labs in the UO's new underground Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) research center, and you're likely to hear the name John Donovan. These pros aren't passing the buck, they're merely giving the nod to someone whose expertise they obviously admire.

Dave Johnson, UO chemistry professor, nanotechnology trailblazer, and ONAMI codirector, credits Donovan with being a big influence on the new collaborative, interdisciplinary direction in scientific research at the UO. "John changed the way we do research," he says. "We're developing new ways to do things, and as a result we get better data."

So who is John Donovan?

Donovan is the engaging, energetic director of the CAMCOR (Center for Advanced Materials Characterization in Oregon) Microanalytical Facility at the UO, home of some of the most sensitive scientific instruments in the world. He is an inspiration for other CAMCOR lab managers, and a principal designer of the interior layout for the new ONAMI research center in the Lokey Laboratories building on campus. The center, which will open near the end of this year, houses highly advanced equipment for research in chemistry, nanoscience, materials science, bioscience, geology, and optics.

Having all this equipment under one roof, available to researchers from a variety of scientific disciplines in both academia and industry, is intended to foster collaboration and spur scientific advances. Sharing this phenomenally expensive equipment is not only practical in that it cuts costs, but also productive, because it enables more--and more innovative--research. In addition, CAMCOR has an educational component, providing workshops and hands-on training in the use of the instruments.

The potential for sharing the latest sophisticated equipment with researchers throughout the Northwest and sparking a cross-pollination in scientific methodologies was a large factor in luring Donovan here from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was lab manager for its geology department.

A review of Donovan's history reveals that he is a true Renaissance man. Early in his career, he served a mechanical technician apprenticeship in the accelerator division of the renowned Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) at UC Berkeley, gaining invaluable experience in machining, engineering, and instrument maintenance, design, and troubleshooting. "I learned from the best engineers, technicians, and scientists in the field," he says. Eventually, he went on to become Superintendent of Shops in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley and eventually became an expert in both Electron Microprobe and Scanning Electron Microscopy.

At UC Berkeley, Donovan worked with renowned scientists, including geologists Ian Carmichael (on Mexican volcanics), Garniss Curtis (on K-Ar and Ar-Ar dating techniques), and Walter Alvarez (on Cretaceous-Tertiary impact samples), and astrophysicist Richard Muller (on chemistry and dating of lunar glass spherules from Apollo 11). A geology buff himself, he became more than casually involved in their research projects and made some contributions of his own, including publishing several papers on elastic scattering of electrons with physicist Andrew Westphal. On one of his Franciscan mineral species surveys in northern California he managed to relocate the long-lost type locality for the mineral crossite, originally discovered by Charles Palache in 1894.

Donovan's expertise in all aspects of working with and maintaining sophisticated lab machinery, plus his understanding of science and the needs of researchers, uniquely qualify him for his current job at the UO. His broad background makes him "multilingual" in the lab environment, able to communicate as easily with engineers and machinists as with academics and scientific researchers.

Because of this exceptional skill set, Donovan is constantly designing improvements. He has developed not only important practical hardware modifications, but also an entire line of analysis and imaging software for electron microprobes (www.probesoftware.com). As part of his efforts to improve analytical instrument performance, Donovan continues to re-engineer mechanical and electronic components for obtaining the best possible scientific measurements, including the development of software algorithms and instrumental techniques. His creativity and ability to improvise--"doing a lot with a little," as ONAMI director Skip Rung puts it--has been a big factor in putting ONAMI on the national stage despite its modest budget.

One of Donovan's widely used adaptations in the Microanalytical Facility is remote access video for monitoring, observing--and even performing--microanalysis via the Internet. This feature has proved so useful that it is becoming standard on all CAMCOR's instruments. Each instrument in the lab is equipped with both virtual network computer connections and a high resolution video camera that can pan, tilt, and zoom, enabling a precise view of the procedure being performed. Wherever they are, researchers outside the labs can keep tabs on the progress of a project or help troubleshoot a problem by connecting to the instrument display from their laptop or any available computer. Once connected, a remote user can see exactly what an operator sitting in front of the instrument sees, in fine detail. It is also possible to control the camera movements and the instrument settings remotely, using the camera as a shared remote pointing device to focus on a particular region of interest.

Since January, ONAMI director Skip Rung has utilized this interactive capability to dramatic effect in presentations to science students and science professionals alike. The inspiration for his first demo was the desire to spark the imagination of bright young science students who were finalists in a statewide robotics competition at the Liberty High School gymnasium in Hillsboro. "Rather than simply giving a talk about nanotechnology," Rung says, "I thought it would be more fun to "do nanotechnology!" So he teamed up with Kurt Langworthy in the Microanalytic Facility for a dramatic illustration of nanoscale using electron beam lithography. Using his laptop, a projector, and an audio connection with Langworthy via telephone, Rung accessed the remote video on the scanning electron microscope at the UO and asked Langworthy to show ever-diminishing renditions of concentric O's in the ONAMI logo. Langworthy, using a one-millimeter piece of silicon taped to a penny, etched the logo pattern with the e-beam and then reduced it in stages to one billionth of a meter while the students looked on in wonder.

In June, Rung reprised his performance at the Workshop on Nanoinformatics Strategies in Arlington, Virginia. The conference was an invitation-only gathering of leading scientists and engineers from major U.S. universities and research laboratories in government and industry. With Donovan as his partner operating the electron microprobe at the UO and explaining the samples being analyzed, Rung--again using his laptop, a projector, and a telephone audio connection--treated the select audience to a review of some of UO chemistry professor Dave Johnson's research for developing new nano compounds with ultra low thermal conductivity.

"Being invited to give a demonstration at this conference was a nice honor for us," Rung says. "The demonstration was very well received. Everyone was impressed with the creativity, economy, and efficiency of our remote video setup."

Remote video capability is a boon to scientists like Dr. Lev Zakharov, who is director of the CAMCOR X-Ray facility and divides his time between the OSU and UO campuses. "One of the online video cameras inside the ONAMI project has been installed in the X-ray lab at OSU to provide support for the joint UO and OSU X-ray facility," he explains. "It is a very useful channel which allows me to check online the status of the diffractometer at OSU. It is especially important because not all parameters of the system can be checked through a computer connected to the diffractometer."

Zakharov sees tremendous potential for even more collaboration between OSU and the UO when the streaming video connection becomes two-way. "The installed video camera is just the first step in improving communication between the UO and OSU, and we have to keep moving in this direction," he says.

The potential role of interactive remote video in instruction and training is also apparent. Steve Golledge, Director of CAMCOR's Surface Analytical Facility, has already received some requests from professors at other Oregon universities to give remote video demonstrations for classroom use.

All the newer CAMCOR instruments are connected to NWNanoNet, the network for ONAMI researchers and industry partners, making live images available to everyone in the ONAMI community. From the beginning, ONAMI's model has been all about sharing resources, not only to cut costs, but also to foster innovation, collaboration, and exchanges across scientific disciplines. ONAMI's rich mix of educational, research, governmental, and industry affiliates provides great potential for scientific advances.

When the companion building to the underground ONAMI facility at the UO is completed in 2012, the full collaborative vision of the new Integrative Science Complex (ISC) and its academic mission will start to take shape. This multistory structure will house classrooms and instrument labs used in the UO's cognitive neuroscience programs and physical, biological, and computer science. These, together with ONAMI's shared, networked facilities will work together to contribute to faculty research, provide valuable internships for students, and offer a rich resource for classroom demonstrations.

Donovan is one of the primary cheerleaders for the innovative, collaborative integrative science model. "Science is all about seeing with new eyes," he says, and that's clearly the motto he lives by. His creative contributions to the CAMCOR labs give us a glimpse of the kind of fresh vision that will guide ONAMI researchers in the decades to come.

For more about ONAMI and CAMCOR, see http://www.onami.us/ and http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/Outreach/CAMCOR/About.html