Maximising technology transfer for society
It is important to create an ecosystem for scientists, engineers and inventors to adapt the deep technologies they develop for successful commercial ventures. This is a great way to maximise the potential of technology transfer for society.
Presenting on this at ASP2022 was Dr Farah Fahim, the co-convenor for Application and Industry for Snowmass. Snowmass is the Particle Physics Community Planning Exercise where the entire High Energy Physics community comes together to identify and document a vision for the future of particle physics in the U.S. and its international partners. This includes studying and creating recommendations to address both the science and community requirements of the field.
Dr Fahim is also a principal engineer and Division Head for Microelectronics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) – the U.S.’s premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research, situated near Chicago and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr Fahim has a PhD in electrical and computing engineering. For the past 15 years she has focused on developing new technology in the form of low-noise, highspeed, reconfigurable pixel detectors, which operate in harsh environments, for a variety of applications including high-energy physics, photon science and space science. “At the same time, on a commercial level, we believe these pixel detectors can become the medical imaging technology for tomorrow, and venture capital firms are interested,” she explains.
While pushing the technology bounds for physics, incredibly useful commercial applications have emerged over the decades, such as detectors for PET scans or magnets for MRI machines which were originally developed for high energy physics.
“There is huge potential for return on investment but most industries out there don’t know what we are doing and what we can do; that we can, for example, be a partner and significantly contribute to advancing instrumentation for financial systems, medical imaging and other commercial technology products.”
Dr Fahim adds that to accommodate deep technology commercialisation, there has to be a shift in the way national lab researchers are supported, along with adding funding programmes specifically aimed at deep technology transfer. At academic institutions, university professors are encouraged to start spinoffs and engage in technology commercialisation with no impact on their university research and teaching role. However at national labs, research and commercialisation is almost mutually exclusive for scientists and engineers. There is a hard transition that needs to be made from a researcher to an entrepreneur, with little or no mechanism to derisk this process creating an undue burden and automatically excluding certain socio-economic backgrounds.
“At Snowmass we explored how we can improve this process and also study globally ways in which CERN (Switzerland), RIKEN and KEK (Japan) enable technology commercialization,” explains Dr Fahim.
“The tech developed for particle physics is orders of magnitude more challenging and far outpaces the need for current commercial applications. Quantum computing today as an example is facing the same but hugely elevated level of issues that classical computing faced 50 years ago, including how to solve the wiring and automation challenge, and how to compensate for drift. These scaling challenges are similar to those we encounter for deploying large high energy physics detectors.”
For her research she collaborates extensively with industry “because everything we use in deep technology development at Fermilab has to be robust and reliable and it has to be commercially made. Therefore we need an ecosystem where industry supports physics and technology developed for physics gets utilised by industry.”
On a commercial level, we believe these pixel detectors can become the medical imaging technology for tomorrow, and venture capital firms are interested