Interview in 2011

Tony Hickson, Managing Director of Technology Transfer at Imperial Innovations, talked to Nature Materials about their efforts in stimulating academics at Imperial College London to disclose their inventions, and about trends in the patent system and the challenges of patenting early-stage technology.

Pavel Exner, the newly elected Vice President of the European Research Council and Scientific Director of the Doppler Institute for Mathematical Physics and Applied Mathematics in Prague, talked to Nature Materials about his role in the European funding institution, the value of peer review in identifying the best scientists, the rise of science metrics and the challenges of running an efficient evaluation system.

John Clarke told Nature Materials about his work on superconducting quantum interference devices — SQUIDs — and his fascination with their applicability to many fields, from medicine to geophysics to quantum information and cosmology.

The critical shortage of rare-earth elements is a concern for a number of important technologies, but also an opportunity to research alternative materials and technologies, says Alexander King, director of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory.