Events from the AJ Clark School of Engineering http://eng.umd.edu/events/ Mon, 22 Jan 2018 09:30:45 EST http://eng.umd.edu/images/clark_logo_4email.gif http://eng.umd.edu/events/ Thursday, February 15, 2018 9:00 PM, 1146 AV Williams Building, Gregory CookseyFluid Metrology GroupNational Institute of Standards and Technology Title and description to come. Bio and research information Fluid Metrology Group gregory.cooksey@nist.gov (301) 975-5529 PhD, Bioengineering, University of WashingtonBS, Electrical Engineering, University of Kansas Microfluidic technologies hold great promise for use in many industries.  In particular, they are well suited to support the manipulation and measurement of microscale quantities of material (e.g. drugs, nanoparticles and cells) and to conduct large numbers of miniaturized physical, chemical and biological studies simultaneously. NIST is focused on facilitating reproducibility, improving detection limits, and expanding the measurement capabilities of microfluidic control and sensing technologies.   As part of a broader NIST-on-a-Chip program, which has the goal of deploying small, high-quality measurement systems, the microfluidics team  is developing microscale platforms to advance the measurement of physical and chemical properties of fluids on the microscale.  These technologies broadly impact the research and development of systems that require flow-based physical measurements (e.g. temperature, pressure, mass transfer), chemical analyses (e.g. spectroscopy, calorimetry, environmental monitoring), and diagnostic and therapeutic applications (e.g. flow cytometry, automated cell assays, medical perfusion systems).   Our current work includes developing flow meters that incorporate photonic structures and cytometers that can optically measure particles under flow (see diagram below).  The goal is to achieve rapid and accurate detection in a system that can be easily parallelized for high-throughput measurements.  One application of particular interest is to develop micro- and optofluidic tools that can aid in the detection of rare or dangerous cell types among background of millions of harmless cells (e.g. detecting circulating tumor cells in blood, establishing safety of therapies developed from stem cells, or identifying pathogenic bacteria in food or blood).  Many clinical and regulatory decisions could be improved by having tests with improved speed and reliability. http://www.msi.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=13046 http://www.msi.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=13046 Thursday, March 08, 2018 9:00 PM, 1146 AV Williams Building, Rebecca Schulman Assistant Professor Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Computer Science Johns Hopkins University Schulman Lab Title and abstract to come BiographyRebecca Schulman is an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering with a secondary appointment in computer science at Johns Hopkins University. She arrived at Johns Hopkins after working as a Miller Research Fellow in physics (advisor, Jan Liphardt) at the University of California Berkeley. She received a doctoral degree from the California Institute of Technology in Computation and Neural Systems, where she studied with Erik Winfree, and undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Schulman is an interdisciplinary investigator. Her research focuses on the development of materials and nanostructures with the capacity for growth, transformation and response similar to those of biological materials. She uses fundamental ideas from chemical engineering, biology, chemistry, soft matter physics, computer science and mathematics together to design and construct these materials and combines theory, modeling and experiment in her work. Dr. Schulman's work lies at the interface of structural and dynamic DNA nanotechnology, materials science and synthetic biology. Dr. Schulman's group develops tools for the construction of materials that can be reconfigured into numerous different dynamic micron-scale architectures, as the cytoskeleton does using synthetic DNA components. This work includes the development of mechanisms for controlling the nucleation and architecture of semiflexible filaments using the design of assembly pathways with specific energy barriers (Nano Letters 2013, ACS Nano 2017, Nanoscale 2017). Her group also showed how these filaments can assemble between molecule landmarks separated by microns in length, forming circuit-like connectors (Nature Nanotechnology, 2017). The design of reconfigurable materials requires precise control over assembly pathways, which in turn requires knowing about the thermodynamics and kinetics of self-assembly processes. Prof. Schulman's group has developed rigorous techniques to precisely measure and control the thermodynamics and kinetics of DNA origami components (J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 2016) and also understand how cooperative interactions that occur during assembly of lattices or other large-scale structures (ACS Nano 2016). A major focus of work in Dr. Schulman's group is the design of molecular circuits that can control material by integrating information from external stimuli and producing oligonucleotide signals that alter the conformation or induce the assembly or disassembly of DNA components. This work includes modeling of chemical reaction networks constructed using DNA strand displacement (Roy. Soc. Inter. 2015) and the design of circuits, such as circuit for time-controlled release of different oligonucleotide signals (ACS Synthetic Biology 2016). Oligonucleotide signals can direct the assembly and disassembly of nanostructures at specific interfaces and can also on their own form spatial patterns if concentrations of these signals are different in different spatial regions of a material. Dr. Schulman's group has designed mechanisms for forming complex spatial patterns, such as stick figures via the interplay of reactions and diffusion, using molecular circuits inspired by genomic programs for development (Technology, 2013). Her group recently showed how dissipative reactions orchestrated by such molecular circuits can overcome mixing forces to generate stable patterns and shapes (RSC Advances 2017). Dr. Schulman has received an NSF CAREER Award, DOE Early Career Award, Turing Scholar Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Sherman Chang Award for contributions to research on the origin of life and a Miller research fellowship. Her work received best at conference awards at the Foundations of Nanoscience Conference (2017), DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (2014) and the European Conference on Artificial Life (2005). As an undergraduate, Dr. Schulman worked with Prof. Gerald Sussman as part of the amorphous computing project. Also as an undergraduate she worked with and published papers with Prof. Boris Katz on natural language processing software and search engine construction. Dr. Schulman helped start the company Answerfriend.com and has also worked with or consulted for several Silicon Valley software companies. http://www.msi.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=13047 http://www.msi.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=13047