Chris Yip is seeing things
Molecular images offer medicine, manufacturing important next steps.
There is a photo in the Yip family album of three-year-old Christopher, peering into a microscope as if it’s the most normal thing in the world for a toddler to do.
Thirty-four years later, young Christopher is now Professor Chris Yip, award-winning chemical engineer and a guy still fascinated by what he can see through microscopes. He’s still got the one seen in the childhood photo. He’s also using a lab full of others to revolutionize our ability to see the most minute features of the biological and chemical world.
Yip uses processes such as spectroscopy and microscopy that enable us to see biological and chemical processes that occur at the molecular level. And seeing things at these tiny sizes (a molecule is about 100,000 times smaller than a strand of hair) offers science the next step – to be able to manipulate atoms and molecules to make stronger materials or control the pathways of disease.
But Yip feels the technology can be better, so he has established the Centre for Studies in Molecular Imaging (CSMI). With investment from the Canada Research Chairs, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Ontario Innovation Trust, Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund and Premier’s Research Excellence Awards, in addition to private sector support, the CSMI is a unique-in-Canada resource.
“What we can see today was unheard of even 30 years ago,” says Yip. “But even with the sophisticated technology we have, many approaches give us only static images and some require preparatory steps that physically damage or alter the sample of the material being examined.”
Yip’s work is aimed at integrating leading imaging systems and combining their features to assemble more comprehensive means of studying molecular structures, processes and events.
Yip notes that the essential factor at CSMI is the enthusiastic team of graduate and undergraduate students. He pays particular tribute to biochemistry graduate student Andrea Slade. “PhD students are vital to a lab and Andrea has put ours at the forefront.”
The path to this productive enterprise began at U of T in the late 1980s, when Yip earned his B.Sc. in chemical engineering. Moving to the University of Minnesota, he also did post-doctoral work for Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. It was a tough balancing act. “I had to regularly drive back and forth between Minneapolis and Indianapolis, which is about a 20-hour round trip.”
His road trip days are over, however, and he is grounded at U of T. He is also attracting important external partners, such as Battelle, a U.S.-based technology development leader. “That Battelle sees our lab as a resource is a good indication of how far we have come. They have other national research facilities in the U.S. they could have used. But they’ve decided to work with us.”