News

Message from the Director

In an age of global scientific advances and intrinsic research opportunities, we at the centers of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at UCF strive to empower, inspire and challenge. . . Read the complete announcement

Dr. Sudipta Seal and Dr. Artem Masunov recognized by National Science Foundation

The research of Drs. Seal and Masunov is featured in a Behind the Scenes look from LiveScience.com. Their work is also featured on the ORC web page and on the NSF website.

Orlando Health Media Features the Research of Dr. Aman Behal

Dr. Behal has been featured for his research with the Manus ARM (Assistive Robotic Manipulator). Read the article here.

Dr. J. Manuel Perez featured on www.ucf.edu

Dr. Perez has been featured on the UCF website for his work with nanoparticles related to cancer research. Read the article here.

Dr. Qun Huo featured on www.ucf.edu

Dr. Huo has been featured in an article on the UCF website for her work with gold nanoparticles. Read the article here.

Nano Graduate Student Wins Best Poster

We are pleased to announce that Pansy Patel has received the best poster award at the FAME 2009: 85th Annual Florida Meeting and Exposition. The event was held for the Florida division of ACS (Advanced Chemical Society). The poster is titled "'Density Functional Theory In Design of Fatigue-Resistant Photochromic Materials For Optical Switching And Data Storage.

NanoScience Graduate Student Receives AVS Graduate Research Award

Congratulations to Atul Asati on receiving the AVS (American Vacuum Society) Graduate Research Award for 2009. Atul will be presented with this award at the AVS International Symposium and Exhibition in San Jose, California this November. The award is given to students in recognition of excellence in the sciences and technologies of interest to AVS.

NSTC Interim Director Named 2009 UCF Pegasus Professor

Professor Dr. Debra Reinhart has earned UCF's top faculty honor by being named Pegasus Professor for her devoted service to the university and its students and her notable accomplishments in the field of Environmental Engineering. Since 2000, only a handful of professors have received the Pegasus Professor Award which recognizes sustained excellence in teaching, research, and service. As a Pegasus Professor, Dr. Reinhart will receive a statue of the UCF Pegasus, a gold Pegasus Professor Medallion and a check for $5,000. We congratulate Dr. Reinhart for this honor, certainly the faculty and students of the NanoScience Technology Center have benefited under her wise leadership. For more about the honor, see the article from UCF News & Information.

Dr. Perez's Ceria Nanoparticle research highlighted in C&EN and appears as a cover in Angewandte Chemie Int'l Edition

Congratulations to Dr. J. Manuel Perez and his group for their recent paper in Angewandte Chemie titled "Oxidase-like activity of polymer coated cerium oxide nanoparticles." In this paper, the authors report the use of cerium oxide nanoparticles as a versatile aqueous redox catalyst that can oxidize a series of compounds without the need of hydrogen peroxide. This finding can be used in the design of simpler and less expensive immunoassays to detect cancer cells and potentially bacteria. This work is featured in the Communication's cover of the journal and also in the Science and Technology Concentrate section of the February 16 edition of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN).

Nano Graduate Student receives Grad Research Excellence Award

We are happy to announce that Dr. J. Manuel Perez's graduate student Atul Asati will receive a Ellie Lilly Graduate Research Excellence Award from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS). This prestigious award will be presented at the AAPS National Biotechnology Conference in Seattle, WA this coming June. He was selected to present their work in the creation of polymer coated ceria nanoparticles.

Nano Graduate Student is selected for Order of Pegasus

We are happy to announce that Satyender Goel was selected for the Order Of Pegasus ( the highest student award bestowed by UCF). Graduate students are selected based on their academic achievement, professional or community service, leadership, and publication or research experiences. We congratulate Satyender on this accomplishment. The award ceremony is scheduled for April 22, 2009 at 5:30pm in the UCF Student Union.

Dr. Masunov Awarded NSF Collabovative Research Grant

Dr. Artëm Masunov (Assistant Professor, Joint NSTC & Chemistry) will serve as a Co-PI on a new $1.8 Million 4-Year Collaborative Research in Chemistry Grant from NSF titled Self-Organized Aggregates in Photonics (SOAP): A Comprehensive Approach to Multiphoton Absorbing Supramolecular Assemblies (PI: Dr. Kevin Belfield, Professor and Chair, Department of Chemistry). See here for more information.

New Publication by Khondaker & Stokes in Applied Physics Letters: A new technique to fabricate quantum transistors from carbon nanotubes

The team of Khondaker and Stokes devised a new technique to engineer quantum transistors which will be published in Applied Physics Letters (Issue 92). Computer electronics experts worries about what is going to occur when transistors shrink so small that electron quantum effects begin to play a role. In response, Khondaker and Stokes have controllably fabricated single electron transistors, a device that exploits quantum tunneling and the movement of individual electrons, from individual single-walled carbon nanotubes. Making these devices as small as possible is a key ingredient for effective device operation with the possibility of operating at room temperatures. This technique lays the foundation of large scale fabrication of single electron transistors in computer chips of the future.

Nano student wins ACS Graduate Award

Congratulations to Satyender Goel for receiving the Graduate Student Excellence Award-Chemical Computing Group from the 236th American Chemical Society's National conference to be held in Philadelphia this August. See www.acscomp.org/Awards/ccg.html for more information.

Dr. Perez Awarded NIH R01 Grant

Congratulations to Dr. J. Manuel Perez (joint Chemistry appointment) who just received word that his National Institute of Health (NIH) R01 project titled An integrated NMR/magnetic nanosensor system for detection of bacteria and toxins will be awarded. This NIH/NIGMS R01 will provide over $800,000 over the four years of this project to address this crucial topic. This project will address the need for point-of-care, field-based analysis for water- and food-borne toxins and bacteria that cause diseases.

New Cover Article

Congratulations to Dr. Qun "Treen" Huo for her new cover article in the July 7th, 2008 edition of ChemComm titled "Surface modification of gold nanorods through a place exchange reaction inside an ionic exchange resin."

Dr. Masunov wins ACS HP Outstanding Junior Faculty Award

Congratulations to Dr. Artem Masunov (joint NSTC & Chemistry faculty) for winning the American Chemical Society's Hewlett Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for the abstract titled: The Comparison of Sum over States (SOS) and Coupled Electronic Oscillator (CEO) formalisms used for computational design of Two Photon Absorbing materials with Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory. This award is presented to only 4 individuals annually and is designed to assist new faculty members in gaining visibility within the Computers in the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP) community. This award will be granted to Dr. Masunov at the Aug 17th ACS meeting in Philadelphia.

NanoScience Student Chosen to Attend Nobel Laureate Meeting

Paul Stokes has been selected as one of the 60 participants from the United States to attend the upcoming Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting for Physics in Germany. Paul is a graduate student in the Department of Physics and is a student of Dr. Saiful Khondaker, who has a joint faculty appointment at the NanoScience Technology Center and in Physics. Paul and Dr. Khondaker have been exploring the mass fabrication of nanoelectric devices using carbon nanotubes (as shown above) as documented in their recent paper in the journal Nanotechnology (19, 175202, 2008) titled "Local-gated single-walled carbon nanotube field effect transistors assembled by AC dielectrophoresis". This paper has received a lot of attention and is currently featured in Nanotechweb.org in an article titled "Large-scale fabrication approach of CMOS compatible high-performance nanotube transistors". Dr. Khondaker initiated Paul's nomination to the Nobel Laureate Meeting which was formally nominated by the VP of Research, Dr. M.J. Soileau. As part of this process, Paul will attend the meeting in Germany, he will listen to the Nobel prize winners' lectures, and will take part in various networking experiences during this week long event from June 29th to July 4th. We congratulate Paul and hope he enjoys this rich educational experience.

Dr. Ming Su's Article Selected for Advanced Materials Cover

Dr. Ming Su has had a paper selected as a cover in the journal Advanced Materials (Volume 20, Number 7) titled "Mass productions of vertically aligned extremely long metallic micro/nanowires using fiber drawing nanomanufacturing."

NSF CAREER AWARDS

The NanoScience Technology Center is proud to announce that three of its faculty members received the prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) award in 2008. The CAREER recipients are Drs. Saiful Khondaker (joint Physics appointment), Andre Gesquiere (joint Chemistry appointment), and Lei Zhai (joint Chemistry appointment). This is a tremendous accomplishment for the three-year old NSTC. Only a few individuals are chosen each year for this award and it is highly unusual for so many to be awarded to a single center or department. As described in the NSF web site: "The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization."

DARPA Young Faculty Award

We are happy to announce that Dr. Michael Leuenberger (joint Physics appointment) has received the prestigious Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). The Young Faculty Award was created to offer a venue by which research ideas proposed by young faculty can be sponsored and promoted within the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA. The Young Faculty Award (YFA) is expected to provide MTO with revolutionary research ideas that are critical to future technology developments. We congratulate Dr. Leuenberger in this achievement and wish him success in this new endeavor.

Three Nano Students Win Best Poster Awards at the 2008 UCF Research Week

We congratulate Atul Asati (mentor: Dr. Perez), Xiong Liu (mentor: Dr. Huo), and Paul Stokes (mentor: Dr. Khondaker) on this accomplishment. The UCF Research Week is an annual event held to highlight student's unique contributions to the university's research mandate. Each annual Research Week has a defining theme and this year's topic was the Environment: Conservation, Energy, and the Quality of Life. The topics of the students posters range from a gold nanoparticle assay that shows potential as a cancer biomarker, cerium oxide nanoparticles (nanoceria) that could be used as neuroprotective agents, and a technique of using carbon nanotubes as transistors that could be used in nanoelectric devices.

NANO @ UCF

For more information see UCF's Office of Research & Commercialization Winter 2008 quarterly newsletter in which they highlighted NANO.