Interview with Dr Mark Munch, President of Bruker Nano Surfaces

Well, there have been really positive changes. It's been a smooth transition. We found a really better home with Bruker because they're a scientific instrument company and it really has become a better fit for us. So we've seen enhanced investment in our sales coverage, service coverage, and our facilities. We've upgraded our facilities around the world, upgraded our factories, and we've had a lot of tremendous support for partnerships and acquisitions. In fact, just recently at the end of last year, we completed an acquisition in Campbell, California. So it's been a very supportive environment. Those have been four areas of really positive change for us, and we've done all that integrating into Bruker without slowing down in innovation at all. We're putting out a number of new products just as we did under VCo. That rate of innovation has just continued under Bruker.

Yeah, these have really been long-standing challenges for the whole AFM industry in terms of adoption. Ease of use: AFMs traditionally are known to be very hard to use. You have to be very specialized in order to get really high quality good results. So we've been focusing on ease of use, and you see that manifested by the invention of PeakForce Tapping mode, of which within that mode we offer ScanAssist. So you find Dimension Icon with ScanAssist, MultiMode with ScanAssist, BioScope Catalyst with ScanAssist. So ease of use is very important, and we've been charging down that path, leading the way for the industry. In addition to that, faster imaging: to take a really good high quality image traditionally has required a lot of patience, and we've changed the game in that, allowing 100 times faster image acquisition speed, and then also while increasing ease of use and fast scanning at the same time, increasing performance range, going down to softer materials without sample damage, and really broadening the applications. So these have been major challenges and we've been making really good progress around all three fronts. Yeah, it's been going very well.

Yeah, so in addition to ease of use and fast imaging and everything I just talked about, going beyond topography is really key. So we are providing fast topography and ease of use towards topography, but also providing quantitative nanoscale information such as quantitative nanomechanical information, quantitative nano electrical information, quantitative chemical ID. Because scientists want to understand, you've given me a really interesting picture of the surface, some really interesting topography, now tell me more about what it is: what is it mechanically, what is it electrically, what is it chemically? So these are really important research directions that we are also investing in. Yeah.

Yeah, so we, of course I'm biased in my answer to this, but I do really think we lead the way in breadth of products to suit any application. We have the largest offering in products and the largest number of modes: electrical modes, topography modes, mechanical modes. In addition to that, we really have led the way in terms of instrument stability for large scanning. The Dimension Icon is a very stable platform, and we've been able to achieve atomic scale resolution over large scans, and that's a first for the industry. To just build a scan over that range and image atomic scale resolution, and then furthermore doing that while going fast. So our Dimension FastScan images atomic scale but over large scan lengths. So there are a number of advantages that we have and we're very proud of. I think our development teams and research teams have done a very good job leading the way, and that's going to help the industry because what we do to help our customers really helps push the whole industry forward. Yeah.

Yeah, so we've always seen Seeing at the Nanoscale as a key event because it really facilitates technical exchange and brings industry together to exchange ideas. We've selected some very nice locations such as Bristol to do that. But some of the changes we see are we're actually going to enhance the number of collaborations. Really leverage the Seeing brand, because we've built quite a brand for the event. I think it's important that we leverage that by building on the number of collaborations, by doing more Seeing events, but also increasing the geographic reach. We often go back to Santa Barbara, for example, on every other Seeing at the Nanoscale, and so we're going to explore other geographies. For example, you'll see not just balancing back and forth between the US and Europe, you'll see us actually going to other regions of the world. Because we built this brand and because it's a really effective conference, I think why not leverage it more broadly. Yeah.

You're welcome. Yeah, nice to meet you.