PEABODY, Mass., Dec. 8 -- Lightening soldiers' loads to increase their mobility and survival is the aim of a partnership announced this week between the JEOL USA, a Massachusetts-based supplier of electron microscopes and analytical instruments, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). JEOL USA President and CEO Robert Santorelli (foreground) tours the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies with Director Ned Thomas.ISN is a US Army-MIT collaboration that will use nanotechnology to help transform soldiers' heavy equipment and bulky clothing by miniaturizing devices and fibers, resulting in lighter-weight protection and the potential for innovative ways to monitor vital signs, maintain communications and integrate new functions into battle gear. As an industrial member of the ISN Industry Consortium, JEOL USA will provide applications support and service for its instruments that are used to capture images of the new fibers and devices at the nanoscale. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, roughly ten times the size of an atom.) The ISN is using a JEOL scanning electron microscope (SEM) to take images of new nanometric materials and a focused ion beam system to prepare and manipulate the samples for imaging on the SEM. JEOL USA staff toured MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. Left to right: Patricia Corkum, JEOL USA marketing manager; Charles Nielsen, vice president; Robert Santorelli, president and CEO; Edwin Thomas, director of ISN; Michael Kersker, JEOL USA vice president; and Eve Downing, ISN director of outreach.The ISN facility -- located at Technology Square on the MIT campus, in Cambridge, Mass. -- is under the direction of professor Ned Thomas, a well-known polymer scientist. ISN partners and researchers are working on new explosives sensing technology and have been studying the nanostructures of naturally tough materials to borrow design principals for synthetic composite armor materials. JEOL USA is a subsidiary of JEOL Ltd., a maker of electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, e-beam lithography and defect analysis equipment. For more information, visit: www.jeolusa.com