During spring break, many DMSE faculty members, grad students, and post-docs traveled to Stuttgart to participate in “Nanoscale Materials: Structure – Property – Relations,” a workshop at the International Max Planck Research School for Advanced Materials.

The three-day event’s emphasis was on nanoscale materials and  their properties, which are governed both by size effects and the contributions of interfaces and surfaces. The interplay of these contributions was addressed in this interdisciplinary and international forum.

Professor Krystyn Van Vliet was one of the organizers. Talks were given by Profs. Van Vliet, Schuh, Thompson, Tuller, and Stellacci. MIT participants came from the Ceder, Ross, Schuh, Stellacci, Thompson, Tuller, and Van Vliet groups.

Several DMSE faculty are participating in this upcoming ILP/MPC conference in Stuttgart, on June 2.

The past decade has experienced an enormous global focus on nanotechnology with development of methods for synthesis, modeling and assembly of nanostructures and their early adoption by the electronics and medical fields. The scale of the required replacement and creation of infrastructure, e.g. transportation, energy, housing, offers an historic opportunity to apply those learnings to the development of new materials and processes for sustainable infrastructure development. A team of faculty associated with the Materials Processing Center at MIT will discuss the potential impact of recent nanotechnology and computational advances on infrastructure related materials development including those for aerospace, energy and resource remediation applications.

Introduction: MPC Activities and Visions for The Future
Carl V. Thompson, Stavros V. and Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Director, Materials Processing Center, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

The “Materials Genome” Project at MIT: Accelerated and Large-Scale Materials Discovery in the Energy Field
Gerbrand Ceder, Richard P. Simmons (1953) Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

A New Frontier in Surface Engineering: Nanoscale Materials
Francesco Stellacci, Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Nano-structured Materials for Next Generation Energy Conversion Systems
Harry Tuller, Professor of Ceramics and Electronic Materials, Director, Crystal Physics and Electroceramics Laboratory (CPEL), MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

If interested and eligible to attend, please contact James Gado at ILP.

Please note that the Wulff Lecture will be held on Tuesday, March 31, at 5:00 in Room 26-100.

Harder, Cheaper, Greener: The Materials Science and Engineering of Nanocrystalline Coatings

Prof. Chris Schuh

March 31, Room 26-100

5:00–6:00

Refreshments immediately following!

In Materials Science and Engineering, basic principles can lead directly to new engineering products that are better, cheaper, and greener. Prof. Schuh will describe the connection between scientific thinking and engineering practice in the area of hard metal coatings. Specifically, he will address the replacement of classical technologies that have significant environmental drawbacks, with a new class of environmentally-friendly coatings. To do so requires the development of a new processing science to control material structure at the nanometer-scale.

Harder, Cheaper, Greener: The Materials Science and Engineering of Nanocrystalline Coatings

Prof. Chris Schuh

March 31, Room 26-100

5:00–6:00

Refreshments immediately following!

In Materials Science and Engineering, basic principles can lead directly to new engineering products that are better, cheaper, and greener. Prof. Schuh will describe the connection between scientific thinking and engineering practice in the area of hard metal coatings. Specifically, he will address the replacement of classical technologies that have significant environmental drawbacks, with a new class of environmentally-friendly coatings. To do so requires the development of a new processing science to control material structure at the nanometer-scale.

Members of the DMSE community, past and present, are presenting exciting research at the APS meeting in Pittsburgh. Here are some of the conference highlights as presented by Medical News Today:

“Backpack’” Functionalized Living Immune Cells, Al Swiston, Darrell Irvine, Michael Rubner, and colleagues. We demonstrate that functional polymeric “backpacks” built from polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEMs) can be attached to a fraction of the surface area of living, individual lymphocytes. Backpacks containing fluorescent polymers, superparamagnetic nanoparticles, and commercially available quantum dots have been attached to B and T-cells, which may be spatially manipulated using a magnetic field. Since the backpack does not occlude the entire cellular surface from the environment, this technique allows functional synthetic payloads to be attached to a cell that is free to perform its native functions, thereby synergistically utilizing both biological and synthetic functionalities. For instance, we have shown that backpack-modified T-cells are able to migrate on surfaces for several hours following backpack attachment. Possible payloads within the PEM backpack include drugs, vaccine antigens, thermally responsive polymers, nanoparticles, and imaging agents. We will discuss how this approach has broad potential for applications in bioimaging, single-cell functionalization, immune system and tissue engineering, and cell-based therapeutics where cell-environment interactions are critical.

Direct Neural Imaging using Ultra-Low Field Magnetic Resonance, Karlene Rosera Maskaly, ’00, PhD ’05, and colleagues. An enduring challenge in neuroscience is the accurate in vivo mapping of neural activity with high spatial and temporal resolution. A method being developed by our group tries to meet this challenge by using Ultra-Low Field (ULF) MRI. Other groups have attempted direct neural imaging (DNI) using high field MRI. However, the use of ULF presents two advantages. First, the susceptibility artifact at high fields, which masks the DNI signal, is negligible at low fields. Second, the reduced Larmor frequency at ULF may overlap with the frequency spectrum of the neural magnetic field, resonantly enhancing the MRI signal. In this presentation, I will first show our custom-built ULF MRI setups that have successfully produced ULF anatomical images. I will then highlight the numerous studies we have done to investigate the feasibility of DNI with these systems, including both experimental and theoretical studies.