I did my PhD work on colloidal semiconductor quantum dots right at the peak of the nano fad.  I would say that popular buzz doesn&#x27;t help or hurt, it&#x27;s mostly noise.  Academically, we&#x27;re expected to spend some time on outreach, so if your field is in the public eye at the moment it does make outreach easier.<p>Believe it or not, the hype among scientists was even worse than among the public, to the point of (in my opinion) hurting good science.  Everyone was shoehorning &quot;nano&quot; into their proposals, regardless if their work was legitimately nano[1], and that really hurt the SNR for manuscripts and grant proposals.<p>[1] I define nanotechnology as dealing with something sufficiently small to access properties not seen in bulk materials.  For many materials, restricting one or more dimensions below 100nm will lead to side-dependent properties.  There was a lot of stuff during the Great Nano Hype that was claimed to be nano, but was say 500nm—that would be &quot;submicron&quot;.