$1.1 million federal grant to help UD’s Norm Wagner and STF Technologies develop invention
As every inquisitive mind knows, the more we learn the more we realize how much we do not know.
Sometimes we have no way to chase answers either. Sometimes we can only guess what might be happening.
Until now, for example, we had no way of analyzing what was happening in a human cell if certain medicines accumulated in them. Was it no big deal — a benign situation? Would the medicines eventually dissipate? Or was a toxic brew developing that might make a patient even sicker?
No instrument available to scientists could explore those surfaces, let alone reveal what was happening where those medicinal particles might gather within a cell.
It’s the kind of question inventor Norman Wagner can’t resist. As an expert in soft materials and neutron scattering, a technology used to study the properties of materials at the subatomic scale, Wagner, the Unidel Robert L. Pigford Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware, has the knowledge necessary to find a way forward in that near-invisible environment.