Nanotechnology has been heralded as the next big technological revolution. In the second of a series of interviews with the five bosses of the new regional Centres of Excellence, Business Correspondent Jonathan Jones met Dr Gerson Machado, the man with the responsibility of leading that revolution in the North-East.

DR GERSON Machado is passionate about the region's plans to build bridges between emerging markets and new technologies.

He is heading CENAMPS, the Centre of Excellence for Nanotechnology, Micro and Photonic Systems - the building blocks of a growing number of businesses in the region.

Based at the Centre for Life, in Newcastle, it is eventually planned to move the centre to two sites - the Atmel plant, formerly Siemens, on North Tyneside, and the Filtronic's operation, which took over the former Fujitsu site in Newton Aycliffe.

That, says Dr Machado, will give the centre of excellence a good regional coverage and will avoid accusations of being Tyneside centric.

Dr Machado, 39, who still owns a farm in the town of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, has a PhD in microelectronics from Imperial College, London.

Before coming to the UK 14 years ago to study clinical engineering, he was a lecturer in biomedical systems at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais, while establishing his own electronic systems company.

His CV makes impressive reading, with time spent in senior management with telecommunications companies Ericsson and Motorola amongst others in the Americas and Europe.

It was an advert in the Sunday Times, placed by regional development agency One NorthEast, that set him on a path to the North-East, a move, he said, that raised eyebrows among his colleagues in London.

But Dr Machado said his "status-driven colleagues" had it all wrong.

He said: "Last year, this region was second only to London as the site for the establishment of new technology start-up businesses.

"Now I want to put the region at the top of that pile, encouraging businesses to come to this region, rather than the technology parks of the South East."

Dr Machado, whose wife Ellen, also 39, is a medical doctor at Imperial College, had never been to the North-East before accepting his new post. He said: "I'd only passed through on the way to Scotland, but I believe it is one of the best kept secrets in the country. The quality of life, the warmth of the people and the spirit they have, make this region what it is."

He said: "We still have a lot to do to establish a new, thriving regional economy, but as someone from outside the region I can see what the North-East has to offer such businesses.

"We have to overcome an £8bn gap in GDP just to become an average region in the UK, but I believe we can bridge that gap and become not just a centre of average, but a centre of excellence.

"The UK as a whole has a huge gap to overcome in terms of investment in new technology, compared to other nations.

"The US federal government invests close to £800m in nanotechnology, and that is more than matched by a wealth of private investment.

"Closer to home, France and Germany invest more than £1bn in such technology."

Dr Machado added: "What attracted me to the centre of excellence job is that I'm an entrepreneur at heart.

"I have my own definition of entrepreneurship - I see it as a privilege to create and more importantly distribute wealth.

"Everyone who works on my farm back in Brazil has a stake in it and shares in both the good and bad times."

The areas of activity of CENAMPS cut across a diverse range of industries, including automotive, biotechnology, chemical, pharmaceutical and electronics.

Dr Machado said: "Nanotechnology deals with the building blocks of matter at atomic and sub-cellular level, offering us the opportunity to develop new materials with different properties, such as harder and lighter materials for car production.

"Microsystems are the next step up the chain, working with particles one thousand times bigger than those used in nanotechnology and applied to the electronics industry.

"Photonics combines electronics and light in applications such as fibre optics, used in everyday telecommunications gadgets, or to interact with medical identification markers to detect diseases.

"A combination of any of these specialties will give companies in the North-East an invaluable competitive edge, enabling them to produce systems and processes that can create wealth and jobs in the region.

"One NorthEast, by creating selected areas where we want to focus our efforts in the future, has enabled a lot of high-calibre people to be sitting closely together, brainstorming for the future to find ways of creating advantages for the region.

"In my new role, I have to find ways of creating sustainability in developing economic activities. I also have to be a catalyst for the emergence of new technologies to sustain the move from old industries into new.

"The centre of excellence aims to identify companies that can benefit from improvements in advanced manufacturing processes and help them find the resources to enable that to happen."

Crucial to the success of Dr Machado's centre of excellence, and indeed the fortunes of all five, is the so-called Triple Helix, a partnership between industry, academia and the Government.

Dr Machado said: "For the long-term aspirations of the centres of excellence to be realised, the Government must substantially boost the amount of money the region receives towards research and development to put it on an equal footing with other UK regions and economies across the globe, particularly regarding areas like Nanotechnology.

"There is a lot of intellectual property, potential and innovation in the North-East. We have some of the best universities in the country and significant human capital, but there is clear opportunity for more balance on the distribution of resources for research and development from Government."

For now, Dr Machado is continuing to get to grips with interest from the worlds of academia and business in his new role and the demands it places on his time.