Employee Spotlight: Dr.V
It only makes sense to start our employee spotlight series with the guy we all love most here at Nanowear – Dr. V!
Dr. Vijay Varadan is a distinguished professor of electrical and biomedical engineering who has focused on the design and development of various electronic, acoustic, and structural composites, smart materials, structures, and devices including sensors, transducers, Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), synthesis and large-scale fabrication of carbon nanotubes, Nanoelectromechanical Systems (NEMS), microwave, acoustic and ultrasonic wave absorbers, and filters.
Our double doctor, and co-founder recently sat down with the team for a quick chat. Here are some highlights from the conversation.
What sparked your interest in the Nanotechnology field?
Remember when you were a kid, and you would use the tin can and string to talk to your friends? This is nothing more than communication in the form of waves, this always fascinated me and I wanted to learn more. If you look at wave propagation it could be anywhere on the frequency range and that frequency determines what it can be used for. When I started off in my career, I wanted to do something to study these waves and how they are important in communication. I decided to come to the USA to study sound waves and the only school that I found at that time was Penn State, where Sabih Hayek was heading up the Engineering Department.
How did you get to Penn State from your home in India?
I came to the United States in 1967 trying to get to State College, PA. The travel agent didn’t understand this was an actual town! So I received a ticket to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and I arrived at 6:30pm only to discover I was still 90 miles away. I needed to take a Greyhound bus, but the last bus of the day had already left. I came here as a young student and I had only $8 on me at the time, of which I had already spent $3 on the taxi ride. I decided to go to a hotel nearby with just my small briefcase on me to ask if they could help me out. On the bargain that after I get the job at Penn State, I would send a check to him; a very nice man gave me a room with dinner and even helped me buy the Greyhound ticket to Penn State the next day, a very nice welcome to America.
Can you tell us a little more about your background?
My first work here in the states was with Sabih Hayek who was my master’s thesis advisor. We studied torpedo and submarine coating and analyzed the sonar waves that go through the water and how they react with the coating. But because of my citizenship status at the time, I couldn’t enter the lab for large part of the research that was funded by the department of defense, so he ended up convincing me to apply at Northwestern. After Northwestern I went on to Cornell, the Ohio State and University of Arkansas before coming back to Penn State. The best part of my experience at all these wonderful places I have been able to work and study never was directly about the job. It was always the most rewarding to be able to learn something from all the great students that I had. And I was able to bring some of these wonderful folks along with me when we founded Nanowear.
How did Nanowear come about?
Back in 2014 I was working at the University of Arkansas, where we had a very nice lab, and a great team. It was the right group to go to with the idea of embedding sensors in a bra or a men’s shirt to monitor an ECG in the human body as they were very excited about developing such a thing. My great students were the reason I was able to accomplish everything there. In the fall of 2014, my son Venk visited the lab to see what I was working on with my students. Based on his experience and background in the financial sector he had a lot of energy about bringing this to market and make it available to people who needed this level of monitoring in healthcare. After a talk I gave on this technology, we partnered with MAS Holdings to gain our first round of funding to get everything off the ground.
What excites you most about Nanowear’s current sensor technology and its potential future uses?
Some of the work we did in the lab was around monitoring the brain waves with the nanosensors. We would monitor the brain and the eyes to see if they could control things, in other words if the eyes looked left or right it would move a small vehicle. We have also investigated putting a sensor in a headband or a cap to monitor brain activity, to assess whether someone had suffered brain damage. I would like to utilize nanosensors one day on a headband or on the forehead to see more brain wave activity and monitor health conditions from that area of the head, and beyond. We know we can monitor the heart and lungs, but what about the head, fetal activity, or even the feet.
You talk a lot how much your team has helped you over the years, what’s the most important thing you look for in your colleagues?
To date I have had a lot of wonderful people recommended to me by other colleagues. While it is great to have a good GPA, or resume, I have always best interacted with people in person when I am able to talk to them personally and talk about their ideas. Working with good people and empowering them to use their ideas and to also give them credit, this will make them feel supported and make them bring their best and most genuine ability to the job.
Thanks for being our fearless leader Dr. V! We are lucky to have you, your bright ideas, and your supportive team at the core of our Nanowear family.