Halas' cancer work earns Department of Defense nod

By Michelle Jin     1/15/09 6:00pm

The world is always looking for a way to cure cancer or at least find a way to fight it. As it turns out, we may just have to look among our faculty.The Department of Defense named Naomi Halas, a professor of chemistry and electrical and computer engineering, a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow at the end of last year.

The Department of Defense selects up to 10 NSSEFFs each year and awards them a grant to conduct research on topics of interest to the DoD. This year, Halas was one of six university scientists and engineers in the nation to receive this honor. She was notified that she had received the award on Nov. 22.

Halas will receive $3 million over the next five years to conduct research in nanophotonics. Nanophotonics is a subfield of nanotechnology which studies the behavior of light on a nanometerscale.

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Halas' work on nanophotonics focuses on the interaction of light with nanoparticles. As the inventor of metal nanoshells, tiny particles with light-absorbing properties, she hopes to use her research to fight cancer and other diseases.

"The work that we are probably best known for is cancer therapy," Halas said. "We use nanoparticles to capture light and convert it to heat to destroy tumors in cancer cells."

Halas, along with Rice bioengineers and other researchers in Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics, has been working with Baylor College of Medicine to focus on these biomedical aspects of nanoshells and further explore the roles they may play in cancer diagnostics and therapy.

"One of the things that has been very exciting for me as somebody that's trained in the sciences is to be embedded in an engineering school and an engineering department," Halas said. "We can do elegant science anywhere, but it is so incredibly exciting when you can do science that actually touches people's lives."

Halas said she believes nanotechnology has potential to improve the current technology and capabilities of all materials.

"We're blending the boundary between what is a material and what is a device," Halas said. "If you build a material up from the nanoscale, you can make that material do work, and you can direct that material by applying a voltage or by stimulating it in some way. So in that sense, you can ask the question, 'Is what you make a material or a device?' And our answer in many cases is that it's both."

Before coming to Rice, Halas worked at IBM's Watson Research Center and the AT&T Bell Laboratories. Her experiences in those laboratories and her background in chemistry and physics set her foundation.

Richard Smalley, a former professor at Rice nanotechnology, was one of the major influences that prompted Halas to join the field. A pioneer in the field of nanotechnology, Smalley was honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for his discovery of the buckyball, a new form of carbon.

"Smalley was a senior faculty member who was very instrumental in recruiting me to Rice and a wonderful colleague for many years," Halas said. "Within the Rice community, a small nucleus of us began to talk and think about nanotechnology very early on in the mid 90s. I was really fortunate to see this very interesting connection between designing nanoparticles and their optical properties."

Although a noted researcher, Halas said the opportunity to train and interact with her students brings her the most pleasure.

"One of the most rewarding things is getting [students] to understand that sometimes the most exciting aspect of research combines ideas from more than one field, sort of getting people to think outside of the box," she said.

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