Dr. Cristie Jo Johnston: So, Professor Tour, let’s talk about you being a racecar driver. So, if you Google the word ‘nanocar,’ your name pops up as the creator, along with some other team members here at Rice University. What is a nanocar? And how do you race a nanocar?

Dr. James Tour: So, a nanocar is a single molecule. It has a chassis, axles, wheels, and motor. And you build it such that it’s all based upon the building up of single molecules. You can park about 50,000 of them across the diameter of a human hair. The diameter is this way across the human hair. So they’re very small. We make about a billion, billion of them at a time. And they had the first nanocar race this summer in Toulouse, France. And we won.

James M. Tour, PhD, has published more than 650 research articles, and has developed more than 100 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. Tour was named among “The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by TheBestSchools.org in 2014, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters ScienceWatch.com in 2014, and was the recipient of the Trotter Prize in “Information, Complexity and Inference” in 2014. He has received numerous other awards for his research and his work as a professor.