Anibal Boscoboinik became Inventor of the Year almost by accident.
“What we do is fundamental science; it is not supposed to be applied,” Boscoboinik explained. “But there was something that we found by accident that turned out could have lots of applications, and we turned it into a patent.”
Boscoboinik is a materials scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state. Lately, he has been researching silicate materials – made of silicon and oxygen, common elements that make up sand – and discovered that this material, which has tiny “cages” about the size of an atom, can trap noble gases.
“We accidentally found that noble gases were getting trapped inside of these little cages. We published that as a curiosity; we thought that nobody cares about noble gases because they are unreactive,” he said.
Then, he and his colleagues started getting contacted by other researchers in relation to this finding. It turned out these little “nanocages” were a big deal – big enough that the Battelle Memorial Institute chose Boscoboinik as its “Inventor of the Year.” Battelle is a nonprofit research group that, in addition to its own research endeavors, oversees the Brookhaven National Lab and eight other national laboratories.
Getting started at UWM
Boscoboinik got his start in science in his home country of Argentina. While he was working toward his undergraduate degree, he attended a science conference and had a fateful encounter with UWM’s Wilfred Tysoe, now a distinguished professor of chemistry. Intrigued by Tysoe’s research, Boscoboinik eventually reached out and applied to become Tysoe’s graduate student. (You can visit here to read about another discovery by a PhD student in Tysoe’s lab.)
And so, Boscoboinik left Argentina and landed in Milwaukee, where he began the path that would lead him to become Inventor of the Year.
He had an interesting start.
“I remember Professor Tysoe took me to my lab. It was in the basement of the (old Chemistry) building and he said, ‘This is your lab.’ And he showed me an empty room,” Boscoboinik recalled with a smile. “He said, ‘You have to build your equipment.’”
So, he did. Piece by piece, over the next few years, Boscoboinik designed and built the machinery he needed to conduct his PhD research. He was dedicated to finding the best results, so much so that he even scrounged a discarded mattress from the curb in front of a dorm so that he could stow it in his lab and work overnight.
“The instrument was for doing a scanning tunneling microscopy, the image down to the atomic level, single atoms on single molecules on surfaces of materials,” he said. “This is very sensitive to vibrations, so (I worked) in the basement where you get less noise. In particular, the noise is less at night because there are no cars, which produce enough vibration that you can see it when you’re looking at single atoms on the surface. So, the best images were taken at night.”
Lest you think he suffered in pursuit of his research, “It was a good time. I enjoyed it,” Boscoboinik said.
After he graduated from UWM with his PhD in chemistry, Boscoboinik briefly worked in Germany at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society before returning to the U.S. to take a position at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Part of the country’s system of national laboratories, BNL is known for having the world’s second-largest particle accelerator after the large hadron collider at CERN in Switzerland. It is also home to a synchrotron light source and provides access to research facilities for visiting scientists from around the world.
In Boscoboinik’s department, the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, he and his colleagues work on materials at the nanoscale. It was here that they first discovered the interesting nature of nanocages.
Fundamental to applied science
Nanocages are significant because they can capture noble gases. If you think back to your high school chemistry class, you might recall that noble gases like helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon are famously non-reactive. They do not easily interact with other elements.
Initially, Boscoboinik thought that his discovery was interesting from a theoretical perspective, but other scientists soon made him aware that there are numerous practical applications for his discovery.
Chief among them: Capturing radon, a poisonous gas that often finds its way into the basements of residential homes. If you have a basement, there’s a chance that you also have a radon mitigation system installed in it. Radon exposure is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. Nanocages could potentially absorb this dangerous substance.
There’s another application too, in nuclear power plants.
“When you break down uranium, you release xenon. Xenon poisons a reactor because it absorbs the neutrons that maintain the fission process,” Boscoboinik said. “The xenon makes them less efficient. (So there is) an application there as well for improving nuclear reactors.
“It was amazing to see how relevant these things that I thought were useless really are,” he added.
Others agreed, and Boscoboinik was invited to the Battelle Institute’s headquarters in Ohio earlier this year for a ceremony to accept his award.
He’s excited to know that his science was great in theory – and now it will be great in practice, too.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science