Our Foundation
Beginning with the microfabrication of transistors in the 1960s, control of matter at the microscale enabled the era of electronic miniaturization that ultimately led to the Information Revolution. Today, the newly discovered ability to precisely manipulate matter at the nanoscale is about to usher in an era of even greater economic impact: the Nanotechnology Revolution. Supporting this widely held belief, the National Science Foundation (NSF) estimates the market for nanotechnology products and services will reach $1 trillion by 2015.
Just as Intel® and Motorola® once formed to take advantage of commercial opportunities enabled by microelectronics, Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. has formed to capitalize on the commercial opportunities made possible by its technology for creating a new class of designer macromolecules. These engineered molecular structures – not producible with the traditional methods of pharmacology, chemistry or microelectronics – can be used across a wide spectrum of domains; the full breadth of their applicability is hard to fathom.
Our Competitive Advantage
In addition to world-class nanotechnologists that have skills to design custom macromolecules for a wide variety of domains, Parabon NanoLabs also has a powerful and unique CAD application called the inSēquio Sequence Design Studio. The desperate need for such software by the nano-engineering founders of Parabon NanoLabs is what first brought the team together. By employing extreme-scale grid computing capacity via Parabon's Frontier® Grid Platform, inSēquio can perform DNA sequence optimizations that are not otherwise possible at this time. Using inSēquio, Parabon NanoLabs can rapidly move candidate macromolecular designs through the concept-to-construction product cycle, giving us a tremendous competitive advantage. This combination of talent and breakthrough technology uniquely positions Parabon NanoLabs to produce breakthrough products made possible only by the convergence of these resources.
Our Team
Steven Armentrout, PhD
Founder and President of Parabon NanoLabs and Founder and CEO of Parabon Computation, Dr. Armentrout is a recognized computational scientist and successful entrepreneur. Prior to starting Parabon Computation in 1999, he founded two other companies which he helped guide to successful exits. Dr. Armentrout is experienced leading commercialization and his work has been published in numerous scientific and technical journals, including Science magazine, Neural Computation, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and Clinical Cancer Research. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.
Michael Norton, PhD
A pioneer in the field of DNA-based nanotechnology, Founder of Parabon NanoLabs, and serving as our Chief Scientist, Dr. Norton is a Professor of Chemistry at Marshall University (MU) who began working in the field of DNA nanoscience in 1991. For the past several years, his research interests have been focused on understanding nanomachines and their related elements. Unlike much of nanotech research, which focuses on carbon substrates, Dr. Norton designs and constructs nanostructures using DNA. He graduated from Louisiana State University of Shreveport with a BS in Chemistry, and earned a PhD in Solid State Chemistry from Arizona State University and went on to pursue two years of post-graduate training in Optical and Electronic Materials at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, California. Prior to joining MU, Dr. Norton was an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia. His recent article “Designed Self-Organization for Molecular Optoelectronic Sensors” was published in and appeared on the cover of the International Journal of High Speed Electronics and Systems.
Christopher Dwyer, PhD
Founder of Parabon NanoLabs, our Senior Research Scientist, and an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University, Dr. Dwyer has a unique combination of wet-lab and bit-lab experience, and is considered a pioneer in the merged discipline of DNA nanotechnology and computer science. He has conducted extensive research focused on using DNA as a scaffolding to support computing devices made of other materials, and coauthored a textbook on the subject. He is the author of a breakthrough paper in the field about creating finite lattices with DNA that was the result of weeks of computational processing on a 500-node cluster, and co-authored an article about the attachment of carbon nanotubes to DNA for self-assembly. Dr. Dwyer received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Reference Materials
Norton, Michael; Designed Self-Organization for Molecular Optoelectronic Sensors, International Journal of High Speed Electronics and Systems, 17(2), 311-326, 2007.C. Dwyer, S. H. Park, T. LaBean, A. Lebeck. The Design and Fabrication of a Fully Addressable 8-tile DNA Lattice, Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on the Foundations of Nanoscience: Self-Assembled Architectures and Devices, 187-191, April 2005.
C. Pistol, A. R. Lebeck, C. Dwyer. Design Automation for DNA Self-Assembled Nanostructures, Proceedings of the 43rd Design Automation Conference (DAC), July 2006.
C. Dwyer and A. Lebeck, "An Introduction to DNA Self-Assembled Computer Design", pp. 212, Artech House Publishers, 2008.
C. Dwyer, M. Guthold, M. Falvo, S. Washburn, R. Superfine, and D. Erie, "DNA functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes", Nanotechnology, vol. 13, 601-604, September 2002.
K. Sullivan, S. Luke, C. Larock, S. Cier, S. Armentrout., "Opportunistic evolution: efficient evolutionary computation on large-scale computational grids", Proceedings of the 2008 GECCO conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation, pp. 2227-2232, July 2008.
J. Reggia, S. Armentrout, H. Chou, Y. Peng. "Simple Systems That Exhibit Self-Directed Replication," Science, February 26, 1993.