Month: October 2018

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. William E. Mustain, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina, as a part of the ChBE 2018 Fall Seminar series. Over the past fourteen years, Dr. Mustain has worked in several areas related to electrochemical energy generation and storage including: high capacity materials for Li-ion batteries, catalysts and supports for proton exchange membrane and anion exchange membrane fuel cells and electrolyzers, electrochemical synthesis of fuels, electrochemical control of biological systems, improving the stability and reversibility of materials in alkaline electrochemical cells, the purposeful use of carbonates in low temperature electrochemical systems, and the electrochemical capture and utilization of CO2.

His seminar titled, “Do Fancy Materials Mean that Batteries and Fuel Cells Automatically Work Better? Two Short Stories in Materials and Electrode Engineering,” will take place on Thursday, October 18 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

In recent years, the desire to design, create and/or discover advanced functional nanomaterials has changed the way that faculty members and graduate students approach engineering research.  Though there are many research areas where these materials can (and likely will) make a significant impact, the truth is that in most disciplines, materials with highly complex structures remain on the fringes of the technology.  In some cases, these nanostructured materials require highly complex, costly synthesis procedures that do not scale well. There are also countless examples in the literature where the material of interest performs very well using model systems, but there are significant difficulties in transitioning the material to the real reacting environment.  This is not to say that structure, or more specifically nanostructured materials, should not be investigated – in fact, far from it! What it does mean is that we must be careful to understand that structure is one variable and often times there are other fundamental (surface composition, electronic mobility, thermodynamic barriers, etc) and engineering (porosity, mass transport, etc.) properties that drive behavior in complex environments.

In his talk, Dr. Mustain will present two vignettes.  The first report will detail the adoption of transition metal oxides as the active material at the lithium ion battery anode.  Discussion will center around i) initial efforts in materials design that were ultimately unfruitful (both in the Mustain lab and the literature) and the search for variables that controlled high capacity and capacity retention, ii) difficulties in transitioning metal oxides from half cell to full cell formats, and iii) the renewed importance of material design and geometry in the work – and the new challenges with scaling existing approaches. The second story will discuss the road to achieving high performance anion exchange membrane fuel cells. In this work, the group was able to show that without any new materials, it was possible to both improve the performance of these cells by 10x (defining a new state-of-the-art in the process) as well as enable 100’s of hours of stable operation.

William (Bill) Mustain is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina.  In 2017, Dr. Mustain moved to USC from the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Connecticut where he was an Associate Professor and the United Technologies Corporation Professor of Engineering Innovation.  He joined UConn as an Assistant Professor in 2008, and was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2013.

Dr. Mustain has been the PI or Co-PI on approximately $7.5M of externally funded research projects.  He has published over 80 peer reviewed articles to date and has over 100 invited and conference talks. He also has authored three book chapters and three pending US patents.  He has been the recipient of several awards including the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award (2013), Connecticut Quality Improvement Platinum Award (2014), Supramaniam Srinivasan Young Investigator Award (Awarded by the Energy Technology Division of the Electrochemical Society, 2014), Illinois Institute of Technology Young Alumnus Award (2009), UConn Chemical Engineering Faculty of the Year Award (2017) and Fulbright Scholar Fellowship (2015-2016).

For more information about Dr. Mustain’s project from the seminar and his research group, please visit https://www.mustainlab.com. 

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Jeremy Palmer, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, as a part of the ChBE 2018 Fall Seminar series. Dr. Palmer is a computational scientist studying supercooled liquids and glasses, crystallization phenomena, and adsorption and transport in complex media.

His seminar, titled, “Particle transport in soft, disordered media,” will take place on Thursday, October 11 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Understanding particle transport through soft, disordered media is relevant to applications ranging from medical imaging and drug delivery to enhanced oil recovery and polymer nanocomposite processing. When particle size is much larger or much smaller than typical length scales within the confining medium, transport processes are well described by continuum theories. The continuum assumption breaks down, however, when particles and features of the medium are comparable in size.  In this limit, particle transport remains incompletely understood. In his talk, Dr. Palmer will discuss our recent application of molecular simulation to investigate particle transport through two types of complex soft materials. First, he will demonstrate that advanced simulation techniques can be used to elucidate the physical mechanisms responsible for the anomalous transport behavior that has been recently reported in microscopy experiments on nanoparticles suspended in semidilute polymer solutions. Second, he will show how dynamical trajectories of embedded tracer particles can be analyzed to gain insight into the morphology of the slow and collective structural rearrangements that facilitate relaxation in supercooled liquids and glasses. In both systems, unusual dynamics arise due to the coupling of particle motions with comparably sized fluctuations in the surrounding medium.

Dr. Palmer received his B.S. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University (2006) and PhD (2011) in chemical engineering from North Carolina State University, and he worked as a postdoc in chemical engineering at Princeton University from 2011—2014. In 2014, he joined UH as an Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is the recipient of the Regional Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists (in Chemistry, 2014) and the NSF CAREER Award (2018).

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Jeffrey Twiss as a part of the ChBE 2018 Fall Seminar series. Dr. Twiss is the SmartState Endowed Chair in Childhood Neurotherapeutics and a Professor at the University of South Carolina where he is the Chair of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Twiss was in the Medical Scientist Training program at the Medical University of South Carolina where he received his M.D. and Ph.D.  He subsequently did clinical training in Neuropathology and post-doctoral fellowship in Neurobiology at Stanford University. He was recruited back to South Carolina in 2013 from Drexel University.  His lab is a leader in the field of axonal RNA transport and translation.

His seminar, titled “Leveraging Molecular Knowledge of Growth Mechanisms for Neural Repair Strategies,” will take place on Thursday, October 20, 2018 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Neurons have axons that extend more than a meter in humans, and are used to connect neurons to each other and to target tissues like muscle.  These axons are needed for long-range communication in the nervous system. For spinal cord injury and peripheral nerve injury, movement and sensations are lost when axons are severed and there is a pressing need to develop therapies to facilitate axon regeneration.  The Twiss lab’s work focuses on molecular mechanisms of axon growth, and particularly how localized protein synthesis contributes to axon growth. Neurons regulate mRNA transport into and translation within axons through RNA-protein interactions. In studies focused on these RNA-protein interactions, Dr. Twiss will present recently uncovered mechanisms of mRNA storage in axons that are being targeted as a strategy to accelerate axon regeneration.