Millennium Café

Chris Marone / Eliza Richardson | Geosciences

How have campus climate and faculty activities been impacted by the digital age and increasing pressure to complete research and teaching obligations off campus? What are the effects on Campus Life of research-related travel, task-overload, and pressure to publish?  We have begun a discussion of these issues in the College of EMS and are interested in your thoughts about what the University can do to encourage an environment in which lab benches compete favorably with cyberinfrastructure for our attention and campus venues and activities compete favorably with email as a mode of collegial interaction among faculty, students, and staff.

Much of the understanding in soft material self-assembly has been from a thermodynamic perspective, although most self-assembly conditions are non-equilibrium. To understand how non-equilibrium conditions impact the resulting morphology, the self-assembly process of both a co-surfactant and a block copolymer system was investigated. In the case of the block copolymer, the self-assembly process resulted in materials that were organized at both the nano and the microscale, which led to interesting structured color properties. 

Most of the energy we use today is derived from fossil fuels, but the transition to a carbon-neutral economy will require more than just capturing solar and wind power for electricity generation. We must consider the energy sustainability of our water, food, and industrial infrastructures by shifting from a hydrocarbon to electrochemical platform based on water, hydrogen and electrons—if we are smart enough to solve some very challenging problems in electrochemistry. The Penn State Energy 2100 Strategic Initiative will help mobilize resources in these directions.

Markus Kastner | Materials Characterization Lab

The MCL recently acquired capabilities to enable correlated fluorescence and atomic force microscopy (AFM). This upgrade and other investments open up a wide range of new applications: visualization of single virus particles, observing dynamic processes of biomolecules in real-time, mechanical quantification of tissues on the nanoscale, to the analysis of biomolecular assemblies at the single-molecule level. AFM is one of the few techniques that provides label-free sub-nanometer resolution of proteins, nucleic acid-protein complexes, membranes, and other sensitive bio-molecules and is even able to study living cells under aqueous buffer conditions.

There is a vast disconnect between the crystallization behavior of polymers under controlled conditions and the highly sheared, rapidly-quenched conditions encountered during manufacturing. I will discuss new techniques to understand and manipulate the flow induced crystallization of polymers under fast cooling conditions, to form intentional microstructure, and optimize property profiles of both neat and composite polymers.

Calvin Yeager  |  “Instructions to Harm”

Marlene Carla Ndoun Tangmo  |  “Biochar as a Filter Media for the Adsorption of Emerging Contaminants”

Laxmicharan Samineni  |  “Nature-based Pathogen Filters”

On May 21^th 40 students competed in the Millennium Café Pitch Competition sponsored by PPG.  The competition was fierce as students had <2 minutes to introduce their research in a manner that was understandable and inspiring to our panel of judges.  Don’t miss this opportunity to hear the top-3 winners from this year’s competition.