At first glance, Haverford’s new nanoscience program seems an anomaly.

We all know the mission. Haverford is a teaching college, a sanctuary of small intimate classes. It’s a college laser-focused on learning, not a research institution cranking out earth-shattering papers or spinning off high-tech startups.

You go to Haverford to get a broad educational foundation from world-class teachers. You don’t go there to do cutting-edge research.

Yet Haverford’s nanoscience program, supported for five years by a David and Lucile Packard Foundation grant for a little under a million dollars, has the audacious goal of developing protein-based biomaterials for use in creating nanoscale electronic and mechanical devices.

What’s a college like Haverford doing in a place like nanoscience?

The answer becomes clear when you go beyond the assumption that research and teaching are mutually exclusive enterprises. In fact, the more you look at it, the clearer it becomes that Haverford and nanoscience are a perfect fit for one another.

First, consider that nanoscience is by nature interdisciplinary. As Harvard’s George Whitesides, one of the world’s leading nanoscience researchers, said during an early October talk at Haverford, “Each of the disciplines has its bit, its part, in this story.”

In fact, the awe with which Whitesides, himself a chemist, spoke of a different field is a telling example of how nanoscience forces researchers to bridge conventional disciplines.

“There is in the world a nanotechnology,” he said, “an existing nanotechnology, which is so breathtakingly sophisticated that one barely knows what to make of it, and it is the nanotechnology of … biology.” That kind of cross-border appreciation is a hallmark of nanoscience research.

Like Haverford’s Humanities Center and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, its nanoscience program will advance dialogue between the disciplines. The program itself spans the biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics departments. “We’re already talking about putting together courses, upper-level special topic courses, that we can teach between departments,” says Karin Åkerfeldt, a chemistry professor involved in the program.

Haverford’s new Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center, which houses the program, is explicitly designed to encourage interaction. The sciences are all housed in one building. Labs are designed to facilitate collaborative work.

Second, Haverford’s small size and collegial atmosphere provide fertile ground for such interdisciplinary programs to flourish. In fact, the nanoscience program’s beginnings were as much by serendipity as by design. Many of the personal relationships had already been established. Research interests already overlapped among participating faculty members, which included Robert Fairman and Karl Johnson from the biology department, Åkerfeldt and Julio de Paula from chemistry, Suzanne Amador Kane and Walter Smith from physics, and Robert Manning from the mathematics department, in addition to two post-doctoral fellows.

“I think we’re a little bit lucky in the sense that we found the topic that we’re all interested in and that it fits in with what we were already doing,” Åkerfeldt explains. “When we started to talk and to think of what we could do together, it was a small readjustment.”

It was also a good example of Haverford’s spirit of cooperation playing itself out among faculty members. The College’s small size, intimate atmosphere, and relative lack of academic turf wars make this kind of collaboration infinitely easier.

“I think the size of Haverford has a lot to do with it,” de Paula says. “If we were much bigger than we are, we probably wouldn’t have found each other as easily. We are just small enough that we feel comfortable looking to other departments for help and for additional inspiration.”

Third, and most importantly, nanoscience research supports Haverford’s educational mission. Professors in the nanoscience program report that their research motivates them to teach and that their teaching invigorates their research.

“An active researcher is a motivated teacher,” de Paula says. “The more in tune you are with recent developments in your discipline, the more likely you are to be excited about your discipline”
The lack of graduate students to staff the labs means that undergrads get to step in. “We involve our students so intimately in the research enterprise that research is the ultimate form, the ultimate way, in which we teach our students to do modern science,” de Paula adds. All of the students in the nanoscience program have to work with several different faculty members. Students also get to mentor and teach one another.

The result is a research program helping to provide a well-rounded education in the sciences.

Or, as de Paula ably sums it up, “As far as Haverford is concerned, research is teaching.”


David Forman ’93 is a staff writer for Small Times Media in Ann Arbor, Mich. His work appears in Small Times magazine and smalltimes.com.