University of Toronto biomedical engineering professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, IBBME) has been named the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science North American laureate for 2015.
Already the only person ever elected to all three of Canada’s science academies, Shoichet is the innovative mind behind breakthroughs ranging from ‘space suits’ for fragile stem cells to polymer-based ‘vehicles’ that could let cancer drugs ‘drive’ to affected areas.
The award—which involves a $140,000 prize—recognizes accomplished women researchers and encourages more young women to enter science and technology careers. (A recent report from Engineers Canada revealed that only 18.3 per cent of undergrad engineering degrees in the country were awarded to women in 2013—an area U of T is changing with record-high female enrolment for 2014.)
“Since I can remember, my Mom encouraged me to have a profession,” says Shoichet. “I did well in math and science in high school and was lucky to be able to dream about what I could contribute. Now I’m following that dream for a living.”
Stem cell ‘space suits’ made of Jell-O
For Shoichet, the key to that dream lies in Jell-O-like materials called hydrogels —networks of polymer chains that swell in water, can thin and flow when forced through a needle, and then set almost immediately. These hydrogels allow stem cells or drugs a better chance of getting to and integrating into the parts of the body where they’re needed.
“If you have a series of wires that are all broken, just throwing in more wires won’t fix things,” says Shoichet. “In the nervous system, for example, we need those wires to be connected to a circuit to work…We need the stem cells to survive long enough to integrate, but we need the cells to integrate in order to survive.”
Shoichet and team have solved this chicken-and-the-egg dilemma with a delivery system that acts as a sort of space-suit, incorporating fragile stem cells in a hydrogel that has survival-promoting ‘life-support’ cells inside the gel. This enables the stem cells to survive long enough to give them a fighting chance to integrate—a stage to which most stem cells implanted into the body fail to reach.
Such transplants could someday lead to truly miraculous treatments for spinal cord injuries, stroke and blindness to name a few— where hydrogel-based ‘vehicles’ could transport specifically-engineered cell groups more safely directly to damaged tissue that needs repairing.
‘Driving’ polymer ‘vehicles’ to treatment sites
Shoichet and team are also designing polymers to deliver specially-engineered nano-scale drugs to specific areas of the brain and spinal cord, stimulating existing stem cells to mend damaged tissue.
To do this without damaging the brain or spinal cord, Shoichet and team take a hydrogel containing the stem-cell-stimulating drug and nano-spheres filled with an additional drug to slow the release of the stem-cell-stimulating drug and inject it directly on top the brain or spinal cord for a local, sustained release to the damaged tissue.
This allows the stem-cell-stimulating drug to be carefully laid onto the brain (or spinal cord), safely getting around the blood barrier (or the blood-spinal-cord barrier), beyond which the drug is able to act to promote repair.
“If I knew how complex the central nervous system was, I wouldn’t have gotten into this field,” Shoichet jokes, laughing. “But it’s this complexity that makes my field so exhilarating and full of promise.”
‘Seep-and-destroy’ cancer treatment
Cancer research caught Shoichet’s interest after a good friend of hers died of breast cancer 10 years ago. Now, Shoichet and team are creating materials that will deliver drugs directly to cancer cells, aiming to overcome some of the horrible side-effects of current cancer treatments.
To do so, they deliver potent drugs to the centre of a cancerous area where they disperse throughout that area and stay around long enough to kill cancer cells, leaving healthy cells largely untouched.
Riding inside the polymers that carry these drugs, nano-beads spread through cancer-stricken areas via the vascular system. At 1/1000 the thickness of a human hair, the beads are small enough to cross the leaky cancerous vasculature but large enough to stop at the more solid healthy vasculature.
Shoichet hopes that these discoveries and many others her team is working on – such as microscopic scaffolding that guides where cells will grow tissues for transplantation – will soon help improve our standard of living.
Culture of collaboration
When those real-world benefits come (some of Shoichet’s work has already been commercialized), she insists that it’s all been possible only through connections with hundreds of colleagues and students.
“Molly is a fantastic collaborator who never gives up on people or ideas,” says Dr. Cindi Morshead, colleague and Anatomy Chair at the U of T’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular + Biomolecular Research. “She just has such an incredible energy.”
The motto of The Shoichet Lab—“Solving Problems Together”—is evident in every aspect of the workplace she’s created: At the end of their time with the facility, students have their lab coats “retired” and hung on a wall of fame like the jerseys of iconic hockey legends.
“PhD and Masters students that come here to learn very quickly end up teaching me about what they’ve been tasked with becoming an expert on,” says Shoichet.
Like the time she and research students discovered that one of their hydrogels not only held its contents properly but the material it was made of itself was therapeutic to the tissues it was delivering drugs to.
“Sometimes discoveries are a slow progression, but that was a bit of an ‘ah-ha!’ moment,” says Shoichet. “When the gel didn’t seem to do anything bad and actually seemed to do something good, we stood back and said, ‘hey, we’ve really got something here.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxOjfRAmZQQ
In addition to the honour for Professor Shoichet, U of T and Hospital for Sick Children researcher Dr Vanessa D’Costa received one of this year’s 15 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Rising Talent grants for her research into new drug-resistant strains of salmonella.
U of T Engineering’s Mark Fox (MIE) believes smart cities need smart citizens.
On Feb. 10, 2015, the industrial engineering professor spoke to a capacity crowd at the Twenty Toronto Street Conference Centre about what it means for a city to be a “smart city” and the role that citizens must take in order to meet their service needs.
Fox’s talk was part of the ongoing U of T in Your Neighbourhood lecture series.
What is a smart city?
The concept of the “smart city” is a widely discussed topic in academia, with no single definition.
But Fox said a common characteristic of most smart cities is that they adopt a city-centred view, where it is the city’s (municipal government) responsibility to provide the services, information and anything else they think its citizens need.
He cited Rio de Janeiro as one example. In 2010, Rio’s mayor enlisted IBM to build its Rio Operations Center—an urban command centre with a bank of large digital screens where more than 30 municipal and state departments, plus private utility and transportation companies, monitor the daily activity of the city and potential crisis situations, including traffic, major events and natural disasters.
Fox was one of four U of T engineers who recently returned from India, where he joined U of T president Meric Gertler in discussions with thought leaders and policy makers about the role universities play in the development of smart cities. Last year, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, committed to building 100 smart cities throughout the country.
The citizen perspective
According to the Ontario Ministry of Finance, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is projected to be the fastest growing region in the province, with its population increasing by more than 45 per cent to reach 9.4 million by 2041.
“Where are we going to put these people; how are we going to connect them; and how are we going to make Toronto liveable?” Fox asked.
He said that cities should be smart in trying to do their best to provide us with the appropriate services, information and governance.
“But I believe we need to take a citizen perspective,” Fox said. “Not to replace a city perspective, but another perspective to add on to everything that we are doing.”
A citizen-centric perspective to the smart city vision puts the power in the hands of the people: they choose what services they want to use and participate in government by discovering the information and influencing municipal change.
“We just can’t leave it in the hands of the city to tell us how to do those things,” Fox said. “We have to do some of the heavy lifting.”
It is already happening: through smartphones, apps and cloud computing, citizens are taking control of their lives.
Fox said Uber, the popular mobile-app-based transportation network, is an example of the citizen-perspective approach to the smart city. The app informs the user where all of its taxis and rideshare vehicles are in relation to a user’s location.
He said the Uber of the future, ideally, would route and re-route individuals using various modes of travel—cars, bikes, private and public transportation—based on service availability and location.
Smart citizens need help, too
While citizens are gaining access to more information and the ability to control their urban environments, Fox questioned whether we actually have the capacity to manage it.
“We need something more to turn us into smart citizens,” he said. “We need something that’s going to help us deal with the volume of information flowing at us and the complex decisions we’re going to have to make. And that’s where intelligent agents and artificial intelligence comes in to play.”
Take Siri, Apple’s “personal assistant” for iOS mobile devices, which Fox referenced as a starting point for intelligent agents. At the core of Siri is artificial intelligence technology: speech recognition, domain or common-sense knowledge, planning capabilities—it’s all in there, in a device that fits inside of your pocket.
In the mid-1970s, Fox was a member of team that produced the first successful speech understanding system. The computer was huge—it filled a small room—had a vocabulary of about 100 words, performed a single task and was trained to recognize the speech of one person.
“We dreamed about this 40 years ago,” he said. “Today, it’s a reality.”
Originally published in the 2015 issue of Impact Magazine.
Google “OLED,” and you’ll find scores of articles confidently predicting that this is the year of the organic light-emitting diode. Some of those articles are ten years old. Still, there are reasons to believe the OLED age is finally dawning. In fact, engineering alumnus Michael Helander (EngSci 0T7, MSE PhD 1T2) is betting on it.
Three years ago, he was a PhD student with an important discovery just published in Science—a rising star who could have had his pick of academic postings. Instead, he gave up a life in research to start a technology company he named OTI Lumionics. The failure rate of technology startups, by some estimates, is 90 per cent.
Who would trade the life they’d dreamed of for a chance to play Russian roulette with five chambers loaded? Someone who’s counting on a lot more than just luck.
Why the fuss about OLEDs? And what on earth is an OLED? The best answer to both questions is OTI’s first and only consumer product, the aerelight. It’s an aluminum table lamp—sleek, angled, and a little retro (reminiscent of an older Canadian beauty, 1968’s Contempra phone). The light comes from a 10-cm square wafer no thicker than two sheets of paper—an OLED.
Not only is the lamp beautiful, so is its light. OLEDs are cool to the touch but warm to the eye, dimmable, flexible and efficient. They don’t blaze from a single spot like an LED; they diffuse evenly from every point on their surfaces, which can be arbitrarily large. After seeing the aerelight, other light sources—whether incandescent, fluorescent, or LED—immediately seem huge, hot and obsolete.
Like a conventional light-emitting diode, an organic LED produces light when a voltage is placed across it. The difference is the material between the electrodes. Instead of a crystalline semiconductor, OLEDs use organic compounds—plastics, in essence—similar to the pigments used in colour Xerox machines.
“LEDs are grown from perfect single crystals,” says Helander. “The probability of a defect increases exponentially with size, so it’s limited to a point source. Organic molecules don’t have any long-range order, so they don’t need a perfect single-crystal structure to work. That’s what allows you to distribute it across a large surface.”
Lighting isn’t the only place the OLED shines. It’s already made an appearance in smartphone displays and television screens, where its other advantages—richer colours, deeper blacks and near-instantaneous response times—make it the heir apparent to the liquid crystal display. But OTI is staying away from displays. Multinationals like Samsung and LG have already spent billions to enter and fight over that market.
Lighting, on the other hand, is still in its dark ages. Even the latest technology, the LED, comes packaged to resemble Thomas Edison’s 1880 bulb. That paradigm is about to shift. Soon, a light won’t be a product, but a feature of a surface—any surface. Windows, walls and wallpaper, furniture, cars, and clothes: light will come from everywhere.
If OTI succeeds, Toronto-born Michael Helander will be the reason. He’s a force of nature, intense, ambitious, and at 29, astonishingly accomplished.
As a kid, he wanted to be a scientist. Then he enrolled in the U of T’s Engineering Science program (“because people said it was the hardest”) and realized he wanted to be an engineer. While working on his PhD with Zheng-Hong Lu (MSE), professor and Canada Research Chair in Organic Optoelectronics in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering (“They had lots of shiny equipment, so that got me excited”), he realized he really wanted to be an entrepreneur.
He reached that decision after stumbling on a major discovery. Helander and OTI cofounder Zhibin Wang (MSE MASc 0T8, PhD 1T2) were working with indium tin oxide (ITO)—the industry-standard, transparent yet-conductive coating used in every kind of flat-panel display—when they noticed something unexpected. Some of their samples were working far more efficiently—carrying much more current—than they should. They assumed their equipment was improperly calibrated, but soon ruled that out. The effect was real. Their ITO had been contaminated.
It took months to find the culprit: chlorine from open bottles of cleaning fluid. “Basically, breaking the safety rules,” Helander quips. “The next step: how do we make use of it?”
Helander, Wang and Professor Lu published their answer in Science in May of 2011: chlorinated ITO. A one-atom thick layer of chlorine dramatically increased the brightness of OLEDs while reducing their energy consumption by up to 50 per cent. It also drastically lowered their cost by reducing the number of organic layers needed to make a diode from as many as eight to just two or three.
That news was greeted with considerable interest. “Big companies started approaching us,” Helander says. “They wanted to license or buy the technology. We thought, if they’re willing to pay this much now, there must be much more value than they’re letting on. Let’s try making a go of it ourselves.”
So they created OTI Lumionics. The initials don’t stand for anything. It’s just ITO backwards, a declaration that their approach would be 180 degrees from usual. “Lumionics” is a fabricated word that sounds like light, a choice Helander somewhat regrets because nobody seems able to spell it.
At first, Helander thought OTI would be nothing more than a stepping-stone to an academic career. “When we started the company, we viewed it as another checkbox on the academic CV. Successfully commercialized tech: check.”
But as the months rolled by, a desire to finish what they’d started in the lab took root. Helander and Wang decided their future lay with OTI. Giving up academia for entrepreneurship wasn’t hard, Helander said. By the time he’d earned his PhD, his name was on over a hundred publications, more than most researchers produce in an entire career.
“When you get up to that number of publications it’s almost like a paper mill; it’s just a formula you’re repeating,” he says. “It felt like we had learned the game and it wasn’t challenging anymore. We wanted new challenges.”
New challenges? Check.
Helander takes me into the back corner of OTI’s new offices in the University of Toronto’s venerable Banting Building on College Street. The room is dominated by a seven foot-tall vacuum-deposition chamber that looks like a giant robotic squid.
“This is our rapid prototyping module for organic LEDs,” he explains. “It allows us to make large, flexible panels in about an hour.” He bends a six-inch square sheet of shiny blue-green plastic—a freshly-made OLED—into a half-cylinder. I want to ask for details, but Helander is already talking about his plans for the larger, still empty, room adjacent.
“The pilot scale-up next door will be the same process, except it’ll be ten modules next to each other, so the production time goes down from an hour to minutes.”
Before I can quiz him on that, he’s shifted gears again. “The step after that, starting next year, is building a full production plant, hopefully somewhere in southern Ontario.” Helander speaks very fast, at the edge of comprehensibility, skipping syllables and sometimes entire words in a losing fight to keep up with his own thoughts. “We’ll be pulling together a whole syndicate of partners that are throwing in a whole bunch of support. We’re hoping to get money from the province as well and raise another round of financing. It’s a massive project.”
Sounds ambitious, I manage to interject. “Very ambitious,” he agrees. “People tell us we have lack of focus. But to understand our customers, we have to have our hands in everything. At the same time, we’re a small company. For what we’re doing we should have ten times the personnel and twenty times the capital. Trying to do the impossible—that’s how you succeed.”
It’s clear Helander’s ambition doesn’t stop at table lamps. In fact, it doesn’t even include table lamps—or didn’t, until he and OTI’s senior product designer, Ray Kwa (EngSci 0T0 + PEY), built a few prototypes. Everyone who saw them had the same three questions: “When can I buy it? When can I buy it? When can I buy it?”
So OTI’s nine employees are making OLED panels and assembling lamps on College Street. At the same time, multibillion-dollar giants like Philips, LG and Konica Minolta are preparing to turn out OLED panels by the million. In a few months, OLED table lamps may be going for a fraction of the price—$239 (USD)—of an aerelight.
Remarkably, Helander is unfazed by that prospect. “That would make us so happy,” he says. “It would prove that we’re on the right track and the market is there.”
Helander’s plan is not to sell lamps but to service niches—lots and lots of niches—that are too small for the giants. “There are a lot of partners we work with who only want 10, 50, 100, units. A massive production line can’t do that effectively. Our vision is to enable hundreds of companies, delivering on-demand whatever people need, for applications in lighting, furniture, automotive, wearables, whatever you want.”
Like any entrepreneur, Michael Helander sounds more confident than he has any right to be. For the foreseeable future, OTI will live amongst threats: an untested market, ever-mutating technology, giants ready to grind him to paste, uncertain financial backing. To defend himself, Helander has little more than a small pool of talents, patents and ambitions.
Of course, in his case, that might just be enough.
Impact Magazine is an annual publication from University of Toronto Department of Materials Science & Engineering.
Two things we know: computers keep getting faster and smaller. Why? In large part because we continue to cram more processor cores on a single chip—but making all those processors talk to each other has become a key impediment to future progress.
Professor Natalie Enright Jerger (ECE) is discovering more efficient ways for on-chip networks to communicate, by tackling three challenges: improving communication between cores, caches and memory; streamlining caching protocols; and making parallel programming easier. The vital importance of her work was recognized this week with a Sloan Research Fellowship—one of just 16 awarded to computer scientists in the United States and Canada.
“I’ve followed the careers of the Sloan Research Fellows in my particular area of computer architecture, and there is typically zero to one recipient a year,” said Professor Enright Jerger. “So I wasn’t expecting it when I heard the news. I was thrilled—it’s a great honour.”
The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1955 to “stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.” Fellowships come with a $50,000 research grant over a two-year term.
The 2015 cohort, 126 Fellows across a variety of subject areas, was announced in a full-page ad in the February 23, 2015 edition of The New York Times.
One of eight recipients from a Canadian institution—six of which hail from the University of Toronto—Professor Enright Jerger joined the University of Toronto in 2009 as an assistant professor after completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her group has grown to comprise one post-doctoral fellow, six PhD and three Master’s candidates. She plans to use the research funds to support student stipends and fund students’ travel to conferences.
Professor Enright Jerger continues to distinguish herself as one of the top computer architecture researchers of her generation—last year she received the 2014 Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) Engineering Medal – Young Engineer for exceptional achievements in the field.
It began with the polar vortex of 2014. That’s when University of Toronto engineering alumni Jason Yakimovich (CompE 1T3+PEY) and Alex Huang (ElecE 1T3+PEY), fed up with low temperatures, developed the first intelligent heated base layer.
The “smart” shirt monitors body temperature to provide just the right amount of warmth for its wearer to enjoy outdoor sports—or simply walk from the front door to the subway entrance in comfort.
“That cold winter was the instigator,” said Yakimovich. “We had the idea, and things got pretty serious pretty quickly.”
The team launched a crowd-sourcing campaign on IndieGoGo, calling their star up FuelWear, and raised more than $84,000. They exceeded their target funding by 400 per cent.
Since then, FuelWear joined a U of T incubator for early-stage ideas called the Entrepreneurship Hatchery. They walked away with the program’s highest honour, the Lacavera Prize, which earned the team $20,000 to further develop their company.
FuelWear has attracted media attention from CBC, Financial Post, Huffington Post and elsewhere. And consumers are intensely interested, too.
“As we underestimated the demand for our product, we hit the production cap of our manufacturer in Canada within the first two weeks,” co-founder Clement Zhou told the Financial Post.
“Alex and Jason researched the market and refined the product until they had something that really resonated with people—truly smart clothing that adapted its heating to your activity level and temperature, yet remained comfortable and washable,” said Vaughn Betz (ECE), an associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering.
“The combination of engineering excellence, business acumen and sheer tenacity that they bring to a project has been the secret of their success, and a pleasure to witness.”
Now that they’re a year into building their startup, members of the FuelWear team say they’ve learned a lot and are using that knowledge to grow. Below, co-founder Yakimovich shares the latest news with U of T’s Brianna Goldberg.
What’s new with FuelWear since you won the Lacavera Prize?
We are working on producing the best possible quality Flame Baselayer. It hasn’t been easy; dealing with suppliers requires a very close watch, but we are well underway. We are also investigating potential product improvements and new products such as heated pants or heated leggings. We are looking to join U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab accelerator, a Silicon Valley-based accelerator called Y-combinator and we are seeking investors.
What have you learned about running a startup in the past few months?
We’ve learned a great deal about manufacturing. You can’t expect your suppliers to stick to any schedule you lay out, even if they agree to it. You have to allow for extra time to deal with things that go wrong. For example, our manufacturer of the actual shirt sewed approximately 100 heated patches incorrectly – they all had to be redone.
How has U of T helped you along the way?
The U of T Hatchery and its director, Joseph Orozco, as well as Professor Vaughn Betz, have been very useful.
Joseph has put us in contact with lawyers and accountants to help us with our incorporation, patent and payroll. And they have provided lots of useful advice regarding how to run a business.
Clement is still in school and is only taking a small course load so it is easy for him. Alex is working full time. And I am splitting my time between working for Amazon as a software engineer and working on FuelWear
What’s next for your company?
Next year is going to be an interesting one for FuelWear. Our aim is to grow by 10 times. As such, we are looking for both investment opportunities and another crowdfunding campaign. We have plans to reduce the size of the battery, relocate the heating zones and streamline production. Additionally, we are planning to build our online shop so that we can directly process sales.
It’s about to get a whole lot brighter in Toronto thanks to a significant investment from the Canadian government in a U of T Engineering alumnus’ sustainable lighting company.
OTI Lumionics, a company co-founded by alumnus Michael Helander (EngSci 0T7, MSE PhD 1T2), has been awarded $5.7 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) to implement a pilot production line capable of producing high volumes of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting panels.
“We can make large, flexible OLED panels in about an hour with our rapid prototyping module,” said Helander. “This new pilot production line will be the same process, except it’ll be ten modules next to each other, cutting down the production time from an hour to minutes.”
OTI is one of seven clean technology projects in Ontario announced to receive investments totalling more than $26.8 million from SDTC’s SD Tech Fund™, an initiative that is part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, supporting jobs, economic growth and the environment.
Founded in 2011, OTI Lumionics was created by Helander and several of his U of T Engineering colleagues to commercialize their major breakthrough in OLED technology made during their doctoral studies. Today, OTI employs about a dozen employees—most of them U of T Engineering alumni—and is located in a 3,300 square foot office and lab space in the U of T Banting Building on College Street across from the MaRS Discovery District.
Their inaugural product—the world’s first OLED table lamp, aerelight—was launched to market in 2014.
“Congratulations to all of our U of T Engineering alumni at OTI Lumionics. This is a well-deserved recognition of the important work they are doing,” said Professor Jun Nogami, chair of the U of T Department of Materials Science & Engineering. “This investment shows that our federal government has a strong commitment to supporting leading edge technologies that will help grow Canada’s green research and development knowledge base as we all work towards a more sustainable future.”
Read more about Michael Helander and OTI Lumionics’ story in ‘The Glow of Confidence’ feature in the U of T Department of Materials Science & Engineering’s recently released Impact magazine.