Millennium Café

I will discuss our efforts in investigating molecular orientation at substrate and organic interfaces for the production of artificial “nanograss”. We developed a method for growing oriented single-crystal nanopillars at graphene interfaces for use in high performance organic solar cells. The use of organic single-crystalline devices will have a major impact in accelerating the emerging area of organic electronics, as these highly ordered systems will enable one to extract intrinsic charge carrier transport phenomena that cannot be accurately determined from disordered systems common to amorphous and/or polycrystalline films used in mainstream devices.

Alejandro Briseno | Chemistry

The molecules of life, proteins and nucleic acids are essential parts of every living organism and participate in most processes within cells. Many proteins and some RNA are enzymes that catalyze a number of biochemical reactions. These macromolecules purified from different research labs across Penn State have been studied using a variety of biophysical techniques in our facility. The methods we employ include X-ray crystallography, solution small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), dynamic light scattering, bio-layer interferometry, circular dichroism spectroscopy, micro electron diffraction, molecular modeling, isothermal calorimetry and differential scanning calorimetry. Come learn about some recent examples where the facility has assisted researchers in delineating the structure-function enigmas of various macromolecules.

Neela Yennawar | Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences

We communicate in different ways: hand-shaking, texting, speaking, etc. We speak using different languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, etc., and many of us are bilingual or even multilingual. Living cells also communicate with others in their multicellular society. But are cells monolingual or multilingual? It has been long believed that cells only speak a biochemical language, wherein cells communicate through message-passing factors called morphogens. In this talk I will show compelling evidence that living cells also communicate in the language of mechanics. This bilingual cell communication leads to various fundamental biological functions in development and repair, and dysfunctions in disease and injury. To better understand these phenomena requires multidisciplinary collaborations among mechanicians, chemists, materials scientists, and biologists.

When molecules are confined in nanopores (0.5-10 nm), their characteristics can be altered significantly. For example: certain molecules can be easily converted into other molecules only if they are trapped in a confined space, which inspired catalytic production of gasoline and diesel in petroleum refining. Our research group studies two types of nanoporous materials: zeolites and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and how material morphology can affect their performance. I will demonstrate how zeolites and MOFs can be used in energy-related gas separations and catalytic production of fuels from natural gas derivatives. I will also mention their potential future applications in biological and medical sciences.

Xueyi Zhang | Chemical Engineering

The foundations of crystal chemistry were developed in the early 1900s when scientists realized that a combination of factors including atomic/ionic radii, electronegativity difference, and preferred valence could be used with incredible success to understand and predict an enormous spectrum of crystalline solids. For 100 years, the materials community depended on this approach to guide material engineering efforts. This presentation introduces the concept of entropic stabilization, an orthogonal approach to materials design, where one uses configurational entropy to stabilize new crystals that “escape” conventional predictive power. We will demonstrate the ability to incorporate metal cations into “unusual” structural environments, and potentially realize new materials with interesting structures and physical properties.

Fluid turbulence is everywhere in the natural and engineered world: a complex tangle of vortices and eddies that span a wide range of length and time scales. However, from the point of view of objects and animals suspended in turbulence, this complexity is highly dependent on scale. Small, nearly-massless things are passive tracers, completely at the mercy of the surrounding flow; large, massive things can pass through even strong turbulence without being affected too much by it. In between, there is a continuum of spatiotemporal complexity where suspended matter is intermittently affected by turbulence. We will explore these intermediate scales and their physics, and discuss what they can teach us about both engineering and biology.