Dr. Giaever spoke to Lally students in Professor Pier Abetti’s Management of Research and Development Class about winning the Nobel prize, his career in research, his experience as an inventor, and the challenges of founding and running a technology-based company. Dr. Giaever shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for his work in solid-state physics. In 1991, he co-founded and currently serves as Chief Technology Officer of Applied BioPhysics, a company that manufactures an instrument for monitoring the behavior of cells in tissue culture.
Dr. Giaever received his engineering degree at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. After college, he emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a mechanical engineer with General Electric, and later transferred to GE's Development Center in Schenectady, N.Y. There, he shifted his interest to physics, and did graduate work at Rensselaer, receiving a Ph.D. in 1964.
From 1958 to 1970, Dr. Giaever worked in the fields of thin films, tunneling, and superconductivity. In 1970, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent a year in Cambridge, England studying biophysics. Upon his return to the Research and Development Center in 1971, Dr. Giaever began studying the behavior of organic molecules at solid surfaces, and the interaction of cells with surfaces. In 1988, he became an Institute Professor of Science at Rensselaer.
While working at GE Corporate Research and Development, Dr. Giaever and Dr. Charles R. Keese invented ECIS™ (Electric Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing), a technology, which studies, in real time, the activities of cells grown in tissue culture. At the time, the commercial potential of ECIS was not explored, as it fell outside of GE's core interests. In 1991, as the potential applications of the ECIS technology became more apparent, Giaever and Keese formed Applied BioPhysics to develop, commercialize and market ECIS and other biophysical technologies.
Students questioned Dr. Giaever about the role of management in R&D and about the importance of mentoring through one’s career. Dr. Giaever believes that an R&D manager does best when equipped with a research background, and that the most important role of R&D Management is to encourage researchers to “reach for the stars” and do risky things, cultivating an understanding that “it’s OK to fail.” Dr. Giaever spoke of the importance of mentors in his own career and emphasized how important a good mentor can be to career success.
Applied BioPhysics is located in the Rensselaer Tech Park. The company provides tools for cell research and drug discovery. ECIS has been used in numerous investigations, including measurement of the invasive nature of cancer cells, the barrier function of endothelial cells, and in vitro toxicity testing as an alternative to animal testing. The company’s instruments are used throughout the world at research universities and biotech corporations.