McMaster’s own Kathryn Grandfield graces the cover of ‘Physics Today’
Using the equipment at McMaster’s Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, Grandfield and her team of researchers use a technique known as electron tomography to study bone implant interfaces. Physics Today has a circulation of more than 130,000 and attracts a readership from many scientific societies.
Making the cover of Physics Today for a scientist is like a musician making the front of Rolling Stone.
That’s exactly where McMaster Materials Science and Engineering assistant professor Kathryn Grandfield found herself earlier this month — featured on the front of the most influential physics magazine in the world, in a shot taken by McMaster grad Paulina Rzeczkowska.
“It’s amazing,” said Grandfield, a 28-year-old professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering. “Physics Today is a very prestigious magazine.”
Grandfield’s article covered a range of topics from the history of bone, implants and their interfaces to why devices such as hip replacements or dental implants fail in the body. The piece examined the intricacy of bone structure, how implants bond to bone, and different techniques to assess this at multi-length scales: from large to smaller 3-D imaging techniques.
Grandfield’s article also highlighted the in-depth research she’s conducting at McMaster using powerful microscopes to look deep into the core of materials used in everything from dental fillings to knee replacements.
Using the equipment at McMaster’s Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, Grandfield and her team of researchers use a technique known as electron tomography to study bone implant interfaces. The team has recorded hundreds of transmission electron microscope images and assembled them into three-dimensional models with five nanometer resolution.
In contrast, the head of a pin is about 1 million nanometers across, and a human hair is about 60,000 nanometers in diameter.
Having her work at McMaster put in the global spotlight through Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics, is thrilling, Grandfield said. The magazine has a circulation of more than 130,000 and attracts a readership from many scientific societies.
The editor of the scientific magazine, which provides news coverage and analysis of technological discoveries and research, heard Grandfield speak at a conference in 2014 and asked her to write the piece.
“This is fantastic,” Grandfield said. “This means more people will hearing about the type of work that we’re doing here at McMaster. It will get the word out to the research community the high-level analyses that we can do here.”
