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Spotlight Publications Category

“Long-range transport and directed assembly of charged colloids under aperiodic electrodiffusiophoresis” published in Soft Matter, selected as VINSE Spotlight Publication

Sep. 13, 2022—About the author: Kun Wang is currently a PhD candidate under the direction of Dr. Carlos Silvera Batista. Kun’s research focuses on understanding the long-range kinetics and assembly of colloidal particles under the coupling of electric field and concentration gradient. In the featured publication, Kun and co-authors show how faradaic processes and its induced concentration...

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Elastic stiffening induces one-dimensional phonons in thin Ta 2Se3 nanowires selected as VINSE Spotlight Publication

Aug. 31, 2022—About the author: Zhiliang Pan is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering Department advised by Dr. Deyu Li. Zhiliang’s research focuses on nanoscale heat transfer in low dimensional materials and complex structures. In the recently published work, Zhiliang carried out systematic thermal property measurements on thin Ta2Se3 nanowires. Results indicate signatures of one-dimensional phonons...

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“High-throughput screening of tribological properties of monolayer films using molecular dynamics and machine learning” published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, selected as VINSE Spotlight Publication

Aug. 2, 2022—About the author: Co D. Quach is a Ph.D. candidate in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department under the direction of Dr. Peter Cummings and Dr. Clare McCabe. In this article, Quach and colleagues performed high-throughput screening of thin-film coating to seek designs that could provide favorable tribological properties. Such findings could remove design constraints and...

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“Chemical and Biomolecular Strategies for STING Pathway Activation in Cancer Immunotherapy” published in Chemical Reviews, selected as VINSE Spotlight Publication

Jul. 21, 2022—About the authors: Co-first author, Kyle Garland earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2021 under the direction of Prof. John Wilson and is currently working for Brooklyn Immunotherapeutics, Inc. in San Diego, California as an R&D scientist investigating in vivo gene editing. His dissertation focused on the development of innate immune activators for local...

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“Investigating the effects of N-terminal acetylation on KFE8 self-assembly with 2D IR spectroscopy” published in Biophysical Journal has been selected as a VINSE spotlight publication

Jul. 5, 2022—About the author: William Weeks is a PhD candidate in Chemistry under direction of Dr. Lauren Buchanan. In this article, Will and Dr. Buchanan determine how N-terminal acetylation causes aggregates of a model amphiphilic peptide, KFE8, to shift from a flat to a twisted ribbon structure.  By utilizing the high spectral resolution of two-dimensional infrared...

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“Dynamic Color Tuning with Electrochemically Actuated TiO2 Metasurfaces” published in Nano Letters selected as VINSE Spotlight Publication

Jun. 17, 2022—About the author: Janna Rathert recently completed a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering under the direction of Prof. Jason Valentine at Vanderbilt University and Prof. Cary Pint at Iowa State University. The collaboration between the Pint and Valentine groups seeks to explore ways in which electrochemical methods can be leveraged to reversibly modulate photonic devices, especially...

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“Minimizing the Reorganization Energy of Cobalt Redox Mediators Maximizes Charge Transfer Rates from Quantum Dots” selected as VINSE Spotlight Publication

Jun. 8, 2022—About the author: Madeleine Fort is working on her PhD in Interdisciplinary Materials Science under the guidance of Dr. Janet Macdonald. In this recently published article, she, and Sophia Click from Dr. Sandra Rosenthal’s lab, observed the effect of the reorganization energy of a charge acceptor on electron transfer rates from cadmium-based quantum dots. This...

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Spotlight Publication “Photonic crystals with split ring unit cells for subwavelength light confinement” published in Optics Letters

May. 27, 2022—About the author: Kellen P. Arnold is currently a second-year graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary materials science under the direction of Dr. Sharon Weiss. The Weiss group focuses on advancing silicon photonics for communications, sensing, and quantum information by leveraging nanoscale light-matter interactions in photonic crystal devices. Kellen’s recent publication proposes a new...

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Spotlight Publication: “Fluorescent Colloidal Ferroelectric Nanocrystals” published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society

May. 10, 2022—About the author: Cara Bradsher earned her Ph.D. in October 2021 under the direction of Dr. Sandra Rosenthal and is currently working as a research scientist in nanoparticle research and development in San Diego. Her Ph.D. work focused on the introduction of ferroelectric properties in quantum dots through cation exchange. In recently published work, she...

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Spotlight Publication: “Signatures of atomic structure in subfemtosecond laser-driven electron dynamics in nanogaps” published in Physical Review B

Apr. 28, 2022—About the author: Luke Bhan is currently an undergraduate computer science and physics major working under the supervision of Dr. Kalman Varga. His lab focuses on the simulation of nanoscale materials and their properties. In recently published work, he simulates electron dynamics across nanoscale gaps in aluminum structures containing thousands of atoms. From the simulations,...

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