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Nuclear reactor on WSU campus generates electricity, curiosity

Ken Nash
Ken Nash

The nondescript building sits on the very edge of Washington State University’s campus in Pullman. An anonymous front door leads visitors through a metal detector and into a sparsely decorated reception area. Everyone must sign in. The first clue to what’s inside the building is the familiar Cougar logo emblazoned on top of a door-size international sign for radiation. And the lit “Reactor On” sign. This is the Dodgen Research Facility, home of WSU’s nuclear reactor and the university’s radiation center.

Dr. Ken Nash is a professor of chemistry who works on more efficiently managing nuclear waste. He said the campus reactor makes it possible for him to work with elements that are heavier than uranium.

“These are man-made elements that only exist because we know about nuclear science,” Nash said.

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Seattle Times

Spokesman Review

 

 

New radiochemistry training offered to WSU grad students

Nathalie Wall
Nathalie Wall

A new radiochemistry trainee program at Washington State University will help address a critical shortage of scientists in the nuclear energy industry.

Supported by a $3 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, the program will enhance training at WSU and let graduate students work alongside radiochemistry experts at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the next five years.

“Researchers and staff trained in America’s nuclear era in the late 20th century are retiring in large numbers and the current supply of trainees will not able to keep up with demand,” said Nathalie Wall, associate professor of chemistry and director of the WSU radiochemistry traineeship. “This program will provide our students with a variety of research experiences and a pipeline of potential employees well-educated in radiochemistry.”

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WSU News

Licensing agreement will improve chemical detection

A new licensing partnership between Washington State University and Excellims Corp. will improve chemical detection tools used to identify everything from dangerous chemicals to human disease.

Herbert Hill
Herbert Hill

“I am very happy to see our research achievements being implemented into a commercial instrument,” said Herbert Hill, a WSU Regents professor in chemistry who developed the licensed technology. “This will allow researchers in a variety of academic research and industrial research fields to have a more powerful tool based on ion mobility spectrometry.”

Ching Wu, president and CEO of Excellims, is a former student of Hill. Wu graduated from WSU in 1997 and launched Excellims in 2005. » More …

WSU Enters Worldwide, Exclusive License Agreement for Advanced Ion Mobility Spectrometry–Mass Spectrometry Tech

Herbert Hill
Herbert Hill

Excellims Corporation (Excellims), a leading provider of high performance ion mobility spectrometers (HPIMS), announced that the company has entered into an exclusive worldwide license agreement with Washington State University for a new instrumental method to interface an Ambient Pressure Ion Mobility Spectrometer (APIMS) to a Mass Spectrometer (MS). This new agreement is an expansion of an existing patent licensing agreement between Excellims and WSU. Developed in the laboratory of Dr. Herbert H. Hill Jr., a Regents Professor of chemistry at WSU who has been a leading researcher in the IMS field for 45 years, the new technology will significantly improve the ion transmission into the MS, potentially overcoming sensitivity challenges when interfacing APIMS to MS. » More …

A new IMS breathalyzer for marijuana

Herb Hill
Herb Hill

A team of researchers at Washington State University’s Department of Chemistry has shed new light on the challenges surrounding the growing marijuana industry.

Prof. Herbert Hill and his team of researchers at the WSU Department of Chemistry have come up with a novel approach to measure drugs via breath with ion mobility spectrometry. IMS is currently used for explosives detection at airports and for chemical warfare detection. So Hill and his team decided to extend it further for illicit drug detection.

“I’m an ion mobility spectrometry person, that’s what I do and have been doing for many years,” Hill told R&D Magazine. “We began to focus primarily on THC, although the potential is for this technology to be used for many different kinds of drugs.”

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R&D Magazine