Month: February 2019

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Jennifer Schaefer, an Assistant Professor from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

Her seminar titled, “Next Generation Electrochemical Energy Storage Based Upon Magnesium”, will take place on Thursday, February 21 from 2:00-3:00 in Earle 100.

Advances in energy storage devices are required for the widespread implementation of intermittent renewable electricity generation technologies such as photovoltaics and wind power. In addition, electrification of transportation will allow for the substitution of liquid fossil fuel energy with renewably sourced energy. Energy storage platforms based on more abundant resources are essential for sustainable solutions. Batteries employing magnesium metal anodes are a potential alternative to Li-ion. Magnesium is a good replacement for lithium as it is relatively inexpensive, already recovered commercially from the ocean, and it also has high specific energy capacity. To be a viable option for electric vehicle or grid-scale energy storage technology, the magnesium battery must be safe, efficient, and have a long lifetime. In this talk, I will discuss our recent findings two aspects of magnesium battery electrochemistry: reversibility of magnesium metal anode electrodeposition and stripping as affected by electrolyte speciation, and magnesium-sulfur cathode rechargeability and kinetics.

Jennifer L. Schaefer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Schaefer received M.Eng. and B.Ch.E. degrees in chemical engineering and a B.S. in chemistry from Widener University in 2008. She completed a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Cornell University in January 2014. She then held an NRC Postdoctoral Research Associateship in the Materials Science and Engineering Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology until moving to Notre Dame in July 2015. Her research group studies ion transport, interfacial phenomena, and applied polymer materials in electrochemical and electroactive devices.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, an Assistant Professor from the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University.

Her seminar titled, “Implementing Viscosity Measurements in Point-of-Care Diagnostics”, will take place on Thursday, February 7 from 2:00-3:00 in Earle 100.

There is a great need to develop low-cost devices for infectious disease detection that are rapid, sensitive, and accurate. Current gold standard screening often involves fluorescence-based DNA amplification readings or antibody-based assays to confirm pathogen presence in either patient or environmental samples. We have developed an alternative method, particle diffusometry (PD), where the presence of pathogen is detected by measuring changes in solution viscosity that result from pathogen DNA amplification. We have shown that PD measurements are 10-100 times more sensitive than traditional fluorescent measurements. In this talk I will introduce the fundamentals of particle diffusometry (PD), compare PD measurements to current gold-standard measurements, and discuss our work in translating the PD technology from the lab to a portable smartphone-based detection platform, enabling detection to be done at point of care.
Tamara Kinzer-Ursem is an Assistant Professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. She received her B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of Toledo and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and her post-doctoral training in Molecular Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Purdue she was the Head of R&D in Biochemistry at Maven Biotechnologies and Visiting Associate in Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Kinzer-Ursem has been honored to receive numerous awards for teaching, mentoring, and research including the Willis A. Tacker Award for Outstanding Teaching from Purdue University (2014), Outstanding Engineering Graduate Student Mentor Award (2017), Mandela Fellows Global Innovation Challenge Award (2017), and the NSF CAREER Award (2018).

Research in the Kinzer-Ursem lab focuses on developing tools to advance quantitative descriptions of cellular processes and disease within three areas of expertise: 1) Using particle diffusivity measurements to quantify biomolecular processes; 2) Development of novel protein engineering technologies that enable quantitative description of protein function and elucidate disease mechanisms; and 3) Computational modeling of signal transduction mechanisms to understand cellular processes.

Assistant Professor, Dr. Eric Davis, from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, recently received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The National Science Foundation presents CAREER awards to support outstanding junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education.

This five-year award will enable Dr. Davis and his research team to develop novel nanocomposite materials with functionality that can overcome practical hurdles for large-scale energy storage technologies, such as the redox flow battery. Inadequate ion selectivity in existing charged polymers utilized in redox flow batteries has motivated the incorporation of nanoparticles, a versatile approach for tuning a wide range of properties of polymers. However, the molecular-scale heterogeneity in these materials has confused structure-property relationships needed for the development of viable nanocomposite materials for flow batteries. To address this gap, the research component of this CAREER award focuses on advancing our understanding of fundamental polymer physics governing interactions between functionalized nanoparticles and charged polymers, and how these in turn alter resultant polymer architectures and bulk functional properties that are relevant for selective ion exchange. The design and synthesis of novel soft composite materials will be guided by these fundamental structure-property relationships to yield desirable molecular-scale interactions, thus enabling their functionality for energy storage applications. These findings and materials also have the potential to impact other critical modern technologies that utilize functional polymer membranes, such as water purification and energy delivery.

These research efforts are closely tied to educational initiatives that aim to engage and inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists. Undergraduate and graduate students contributing to this project will be exposed to advanced materials synthesis and characterization techniques, equipping them with the interdisciplinary skills needed to address tomorrow’s engineering challenges. Together with chemical engineering students at Clemson University, this award will develop and implement a STEM-based afterschool program, for students grades 6-8, that emphasizes scientific problem solving through the application of polymer science concepts to tackle hands-on tasks inspired by real-world challenges.