Millennium Café

Andrew Read | Director, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences & Phil Bevilacqua | Department Head, Chemistry

We are very excited to announce a call for projects to enable transformative research at the interface of chemistry and life sciences. This initiative is generously supported by the Benkovic Family Foundation and administered by Department of Chemistry in the Eberly College of Science and Penn State’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. We will give a short overview of the call. Proposals must have potential for rapid and high impact at the broad intersection of chemistry and the life sciences. Deadline Nov. 1, 2021.

The Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems (LiMC²) is a strategic research and educational partnership between The Pennsylvania State University and University of Freiburg.  LiMC² envisions a new paradigm using biological rules and bioinspired approaches to develop materials for resilience, adaptability, and energy harvesting, with the goal of enhancing materials sustainability and broadening the educational mission around academic convergence and global engagement.

Additive manufacturing and 3D printing technology has been around for several decades, but recent advances in materials and processing technology have renewed interest in design, modeling, analysis, and characterization of new materials, parts, and processes that leverage these new capabilities. From novel functionally graded materials to 3D printed ceramics and concrete houses to bioprinting replacement organs, the sky is the limit when it comes to additive materials and manufacturing. 

Sherri Mason | Chemistry | Sustainability Coordinator | Penn State Behrend

Plastic is an amazingly versatile material, whose ever increasing use combined with its durability has led to an ecological crisis. I will highlight some recent work on plastic pollution within freshwater and human consumables. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary expertise and I’m interested in making new connections within Penn State.

The relationship between material processing, structure, and properties is challenging to understand and even harder to predict because it is non-linear, high-dimensional, and results from physical phenomena at many scales. While traditional materials design has relied on human intuition to interpret patterns in known materials and infer new ones with similar (hopefully improved) properties, emerging data science tools offer new strategies to expedite materials design. My group is working to gather these strategies into a common framework which can be applied across many different materials science problems. In this talk, I will share some vignettes illustrating our initial progress and discuss the challenges ahead.

Gaseous signaling molecules such as nitric oxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) have recently attracted growing attention due to their regulatory functions in the cardiovascular, nervous, and immune systems. My group is developing polymer-based delivery systems for these gas molecules to explore the therapeutic potential. In this talk, I will discuss how polymeric material design is being used to delivery of these gaseous molecules and impact biological functions in cardiomyocytes and vascular endothelial cells.