Sept 5, 2014
In dark times, some of us dream of winning the lottery or travelling the world in the hopes of finding happiness and fulfilling our dreams. But maybe we don’t need all of that. May be all we need is to go for a long walk in the freezing cold, end up in a book store, and lay our hands on a book that will change the course of our lives forever. For Arthur Montazeri, it was that simple.
From a protective and conservative family in Urmia, Iran, Montazeri was expected to inherit his father’s profession and become a doctor. A bright high-school student, he spent years bouncing between studies in math, chemistry, programming, and physics , before landing in the one field he had never considered: Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Montazeri is now a PhD candidate working with the Advanced Photovoltaics and Devices Group under the supervision of Professor Nazir Kherani. His story is sprinkled with coincidence, persistence, and optimism, but built on a foundation of uncommon intelligence.
In August 2014, Montazeri was named one of just four 2014 Weston Fellows from the University of Toronto. One of Canada’s most prestigious awards, Weston Fellows receive $50,000 to collaborate with scholars around the world. Montazeri was chosen for his multi-disciplinary work uniting pieces of photonics, electromagnetics, nanoengineering and medicine.
Mireille Khreich sat down with Montazeri to hear his personal story, more about his research and his plans for the Fellowship.
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Montazeri moved from Iran to Canada alone at age 17. Despite graduating with top grades from a “special school” for gifted students, he failed to receive admission to the university of his choice and decided to move abroad. He landed in Ottawa. One winter evening while attending the University of Ottawa, he stepped out into the icy streets in search of a pizza place he knew would be open. That long freezing walk began a chain of events that have given his life direction ever since.
Before arriving at the pizza place and in desperate need of warmth, he ducked into a book store and began to browse. In the science section he lifted a title—on its cover, a crazy-looking guy with messy hair and big glasses caught his attention. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! made Montazeri forget his urgent hunger—he immediately sat down and devoured the book from cover to cover. The next day, he took the bus to the library in search of Feynman’s classic Feynman Lectures on Physics. Only at that moment, after two years of confusion about his direction and the fear of disappointing his parents, he knew he had to pursue physics.
He enrolled at McMaster University to study Engineering Physics, starting in second year because he’d already taken many of the required courses. And, coming from a country where elementary education is as challenging and intense as joining the army, he had already learned all the maths he needed.
He earned his Bachelor’s Degree and began an MASc—influenced by Feynman, physics was all he thought he wanted to do. Two years into his research in biophysics his support ran out, and he decided to quit.
Still lost and unsatisfied, he ended up unhappily working for an insurance company for four years as a business analyst and programmer. “Being unhappy at my job, but staying there because I had to, taught me a lot of things,” says Montazeri “One of them is the discipline to do things I don’t like in an orderly way for a long time. That is a very invaluable asset.” His friend, then a PhD student in McMaster’s Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, often sought Arthur’s help to solve his math problems. A math wizard, Montazeri worked on those problems during lulls at work, and succeeded in solving them after six months. “My friend was very good with circuits, but I was good in the physics part of it,” he remembers. His friend convinced him to go back to school and get a PhD in ECE. Montazeri was not so sure, because his undergraduate degree was Engineering Physics and he had no knowledge of circuits. But he decided to try.
After returning to complete a master’s in electromagnetics, Montazeri applied to begin his PhD. He decided to start by knocking on professors’ doors, introducing himself, and explaining his interests. He found one open door that day: that of Professor Nazir Kherani. Professor Kherani advised Montazeri to check out competing universities, and when he was truly sure UofT was for him, to come back and visit. Montazeri took the advice and travelled, returning to Toronto for a conference. Kherani was also at that conference—for Montazeri, a sign too big to ignore. “We went for dinner and spent hours talking, I realized what a great person he is,” said Montazeri “Most of the things I’m working on now crystalized at that meeting.”
Montazeri has been a PhD student since. “I could never be happier, and I would do it all over again if I could.” He’s currently working on advanced light-trapping plasmonic nanostructures for cross-disciplinary applications. In laymen’s terms: he’s inventing a structure that traps and conserves infrared light, the softest of lights, to be converted to other forms of energy, or even incorporated with medical imaging for a possible replacement of x-rays.
Montazeri explains his big plans for the next year and beyond to Mireille Khreich.
Tell me a little bit about your research—what are you working on right now?
I work with a range of light which is generally considered less energetic than the visible light that we can see, and that’s the infrared. Most objects around us, and we ourselves, give off a lot of infrared light. And that’s because we are all warm. We’re warm because we’re all irradiated by the sun during the day and the food we eat turns into heat in our bodies, and the heat, or anything that’s hot, radiates in the form of infrared. There’s a lot of it out there, and if you can convert it to electricity, you can gain a lot of energy—especially at night when there’s no direct sunlight. Take for example the greenhouse effect—light comes in the form of visible light, once it gets through the ionosphere it hits objects on earth and radiates infrared. The ionosphere allows visible light to pass through, but it doesn’t allow it to escape. This is why there’s the global warming issue now. So, infrared light is trapped around the earth day and night, and if we convert this into a source of electricity than we can have a new form of energy conversion that is like solar cells but that also works at night.
So one thing I’ll be working on as part of the scholarship is to try to incorporate this with sources of energy storage like super capacitors, to convert infrared into electricity and then store it in the super capacitors, to be able to use it later on.
Where are you planning to travel under the auspices of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation?
For my particular work we’ve been already collaborating with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on making these structures. I’ll spend one year working on my research in Berkeley and then will be come back next year to defend my thesis. At UofT we have collaborators in the Department of Medical Imaging. We’re also working with people from Stanford. This work lends itself to several different structures so I’ll be working on different levels of this project like imaging, energy conversion, etc.
Does this help in reducing Global Warming?
We don’t take enough infrared to make an impact on Global Warming. But there’s a big environmental impact in producing a new clean source of energy that will replace fossil fuels.
What material are you using to be able to trap and store infrared?
The reason regular materials give off heat is that they’re not very good conductors to transmit infrared light. And there isn’t a good material in nature or the elements we know that has an effective conduction, just like heat conductors. So, a part of my work and other people’s work is to create well-built and patterned materials that do not exist in nature and cheat by layering and stacking metals and dielectrics, making it useful for the conduction of heat. When we trap and localise infrared radiation to much smaller dimensions than the free wavelength of it, then we can convert it to electricity, hook that up to a super capacitor and charge it. It’s basically a nanotechnology that is assisted with producing something that can convert infrared into electricity.
In your opinion, why did this research win the Weston Fellowship?
It’s a promising direction that opens up many avenues, not only in the field of energy. But with infrared you can do imaging, connect with cells within the human body, stimulate neurons, and more. It’s something that enables a whole new direction of research that is multifaceted. Once you have access to infrared, you can do all sorts of these things. An example of the benefits of infrared in medical imaging: unlike x-rays, it is not damaging to DNA and does not cause cancer. It enables you to look at the body, the cells, and smaller structures within the cells without damaging them. X-rays on the other hand, allow you to look at cells for a fraction of a second and you can’t really see something live, developing and examine it many times. With infrared you have more exposure where you can implant an infrared image sensor in the body and examine cells for as long as you want.
What’s in the long term for Arthur? Would you consider becoming a faculty member or starting your own company?
When I come back here I have to wrap up my thesis and do all the work I have to do here. Hopefully I’ve established networks with the universities I have collaborated with and these might become ongoing collaborations and whatever I had with them will continue to refine. So if all goes well, then I’ll be working on a combination of nano-engineering work with medical imaging.
About becoming a faculty member or starting a company, it all depends on how well the idea goes. I’ll probably have to establish a company. I think that Barrie is one of the wonderful places to start a company; there are a lot of start-ups there. The other possibility is a faculty position here that integrates the different aspects of the imaging and nanoengineering. I think there’s a lot that can be done using nano structures for imaging that are not damaging the human body. Also, my sister is a doctor and researcher in Boston and I would like to collaborate with her one day.
For more information contact:
Mireille Khreich
Communications Assistant
(416) 978-1999
mireille.khreich@utoronto.ca