On Tuesday, November 24, 2020 Physics Department grad student, Ali Daraei successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled: “Importance of the Fibrinogen Alpha-C Connector in Fibrin Fiber Mechanical Properties and Automated Fiber Diameter Measurements in SEM Images of Fibrin Clots“. Dr. Daraei’s thesis was completed under the direction of Professor Martin Guthold.
Professor Paul Anderson has been elected a 2020 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) by the APS Council of Representatives upon the recommendation of the Division of Gravitational Physics . This honor is in recognition of Dr. Anderson’s contributions to the understanding of quantum field theory in curved spacetime applied to black hole and cosmological spacetimes.
Congratulations, Dr. Anderson!
On Wednesday, July 22, 2020 Physics Department grad student, Richard Dudley successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled: “Bose Einstein Condensate Black Hole Analogs“. Dr. Dudley’s thesis was completed under the direction of Professor Paul Anderson.
On Tuesday, April 21, 2020 Physics Department grad student, Andrew Zeidell successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled: “Microstructure Control in Organic and Hybrid Semiconductors and its Impact on Device Performance“. Dr. Zeidell’s thesis was completed under the direction of Professor Oana Jurchescu.
Scott L. Diamond, PhD
Arthur E. Humphrey Professor of
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
University of Pennsylvania
George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)
Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2019, at 3:00 PM
There will be a reception in the Olin Lounge at approximately 4 PM following the colloquium. All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.
ABSTRACT
Excessive bleeding and clotting represent the two extremes of blood function that often concern patients and their doctors. Hundreds of spatiotemporal reactions proceed within activating and aggregating platelets and the polymerizing plasma as blood clots under flow. Microfluidic devices are ideal for recreating transport physics and hemodynamic forces. We have validated several devices to study hemophilia, combinatorial platelet receptor function, drug responses, platelet quorum sensing, and von Willebrand Factor (vWF) assembly in extreme stenotic flows. With multi-scale simulation of reactive blood clotting under flow, it is now possible to predict disease risks using patient-specific hemodynamics and blood biochemistry/pharmacology. This sets the stage for point-of-care microfluidic diagnostics in emerging areas of neonatology, trauma surgery, and angiography.
Biosketch:
Scott L. Diamond, Ph.D. (B.S., Cornell University 1986; Ph.D., Rice University 1990) Dr. Diamond researches biotechnologies in several key areas: endothelial mechanobiology, blood clot dissolving therapies, blood systems biology, nonviral gene therapy, and high throughput drug discovery. He has produced over 230 publications and patents and has served on advisory committees to NSF, NIH, AHA, and NASA, and has consulted extensively for industry and government. Diamond is the recipient of the NSF National Young Investigator Award, the NIH FIRST Award, the American Heart Association Established Investigator Award, the AIChE Allan P. Colburn Award, and the George Heilmeier Excellence in Research Award. Dr. Diamond is an elected Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and the American Institute for Medicine and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Currently, Dr. Diamond is the Director of the Penn Biotechnology Program, with more than 1000 alumni.
Professor Stefan Zauscher
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Duke University
George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)
Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019, at 3:00 PM
There will be a reception in the Olin Lounge at approximately 4 PM following the colloquium. All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.
ABSTRACT
The use of DNA as a polymeric building material transcends its function in biology and is exciting in bionanotechnology for applications ranging from biosensing, to diagnostics, and to targeted drug delivery. Hence, the efficient and precise synthesis of high molecular weight DNA materials has become key to advance DNA bionanotechnology. In the first part of my talk I report on how we exploit a template-independent DNA polymerase —terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT)— to catalyze the polymerization of 2’-deoxyribonucleoside 5’-triphosphates (dNTP, monomer) from the 3’-hydroxyl group of an oligodeoxyribonucleotide (initiator). We found that the reaction kinetics follows a “living” chain-growth polycondensation mechanism, and that like in living polymerizations, the molecular weight of the final product is determined by the starting molar ratio of monomer to initiator. Our synthesis approach can incorporate a wide range of unnatural dNTPs into the growing chain which allows us to synthesize multifunctional block- copolymers that can self-assemble into micellar structures for drug delivery applications.
In the second part of my talk I report on recent activities in developing a new class of acoustic shear wave resonator sensors (SWRS). I will show that by confining fluid into small, rigid channels oriented perpendicularly to the shear direction of the SWRS, we can manipulate liquid to behave as a lossless layer and thus perform precise mass measurements of the confined liquid. Canceling viscous effects in µ-fluidic SWRS not only enhances their mass resolution in liquid to levels observed in air/vacuum, but also enables efficient device miniaturization. Combined with the extremely small volume requirements for sensing (~nL), I will show that µ-luidic SWRS can overcome current barriers for their widespread use in diagnostic sensing and point of care applications.
Kui Tan, PhD
Research Scientist
The University of Texas at Dallas
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)
Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, at 3:00 PM
There will be a reception in the Olin Lounge at approximately 4 PM following the colloquium. All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.
ABSTRACT
Understanding co-adsorption in nanoporous materials such as metal organic frameworks (MOFs) is important for most applications, since these materials are seldom used exclusively for pure gases and are prone to gas contamination. Co-adsorption, however, leads to a variety of processes that complicate the analysis, such as molecular competition for adsorption and diffusion. Due to a lack of in situ characterization techniques within these 3D nanoporous structures, these processes remain largely unknown. Our pioneering studies, which combine in situ infrared spectroscopy and ab initio calculations, have yielded several unexpected findings with respect to the principles governing co-adsorption. For example, binding energy alone is not a sufficient indicator for prediction of molecular exchange and stability. Instead, the occupation of the active sorption sites could be governed by kinetics in a nanoconfined space. We have also identified an unusual synergistic effect involving co-adsorption of NH3 and H2O with a variety of small gases (e.g., CO, CO2, SO2) in a prototypical metal organic framework (MOF) material, i.e., MOF-74. This phenomenon is not due to guest-guest binding, which is usually regarded as a “cooperative binding effect”, but is instead the result of an increase in diffusion barrier for these small molecules. The aforementioned findings inspired us to invent a new strategy for retaining a variety of weakly adsorbing molecules inside the MOFs materials by in situ coating of their external surfaces with ethylenediamine (EDA), a type of sticky molecule. Interestingly, the opening size and breathing rate of the EDA network can be finely tuned by varying the temperature, while accounting for the observed activated adsorption at elevated temperatures. The discovery of this novel temperature-tunable diffusion barrier suggests a new avenue for
tailoring selective adsorption by thermally tuning the surface barrier.
Professor Natalia Khuri
Department of Computer Science
Wake Forest University
George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)
Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, at 3:00 PM
There will be a reception in the Olin Lounge at approximately 4 PM following the colloquium. All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.
ABSTRACT
Solute carrier (SLC) transporters – a family of more than 400 membrane-bound proteins facilitating the transport of ions, drugs, and metabolites across biological membranes – have important roles in physiological processes. Several classes of marketed drugs target SLC transporters, and human genetic studies have provided insight into their roles in both rare and common diseases. Recent technological advances in biophysics and chemical biology allow better characterization of SLC pharmacology. We will describe computational approaches and in vitro experiments to study SLC-mediated drug-drug and drug-nutrient interactions with a focus on two intestinal transporters, the organic anion transporting polypeptide OATP2B1 and the thiamine transporter ThTR-2.
Weronika Wolszczak, PhD
Technical University of Delft
Wake Forest University Postdoc 2019-2021
George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)
Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019, at 3:00 PM
There will be a reception in the Olin Lounge at approximately 4 PM following the colloquium. All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.
This talk will address two research topics which were bases of my Master and PhD theses.
The search for new physics at high energies was motivation for building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful man-made particle accelerator. Five experiments have been constructed along the accelerator tunnel. The two largest ones, ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), are multi-purpose detectors. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”. Here I will present my contribution to the CMS experiment and research before the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Scintillators are important materials for ionizing radiation detection.
As determined by photon detection statistics, the ultimate energy resolution for γ‐photon detection can only be approached for materials that show a perfect proportional response with γ‐energy. A large amount of research has resulted in the discovery of highly proportional materials, such as LaBr3:Ce3+,Sr2+, SrI2:Eu2+ and CsBa2I5:Eu2+. However, the resolution is still far from the theoretical limit. In this part I will discuss my research on non-proportionality of scintillation response and new strategies to improve energy resolution.
TIME: Thursday, October 17, 2019, from 12:30 – 1:30 PM
As the Chief Innovation Officer for First San Francisco Partners, Dr. Chisholm brings more than 25 years’ experience in data management, having worked in a variety of sectors including finance, insurance, manufacturing, government, defense and intelligence, pharmaceuticals and retail. His deep experience spans specializations in data governance, master/reference data management, metadata engineering, business rules management/execution, data architecture and design, and the organization of Enterprise Information Management.
Dr. Chisholm is a well-known presenter at conferences in the US and Europe, writes columns in trade journals, and has authored the books: Managing Reference Data in Enterprise Databases; How to Build a Business Rules Engine; and Definitions in Information Management. In 2011, Dr. Chisholm was presented with the prestigious Data Management Association International Professional Achievement Award for contributions to Master Data Management. He holds an M.A. from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University of Bristol.
As a world-renowned expert in data management and data analysis Dr. Chisholm will discuss career options with students who have strong backgrounds in mathematics and strong analytical skills.
