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Rensselaer received $300,000 in funding
to evaluate a new microelectronics insulating material that
has the potential to double the processing speed of microchips.
The money is part of $1 million in awards to four institutions
through the New York State Office of Science, Technology,
and Academic Research (NYSTAR)'s Technology Transfer Incentive
Program.
Rensselaer has issued
a license to the Polyset Company, who is providing an additional
$300,000 in funding for the project, to manufacture and market
the resins, and will evaluate and optimize the materials for
commercialization. This research is expected to create new
markets for a material that is manufactured in New York state
and add at least 100 new high-tech jobs in the next four to
five years.
James Crivello, professor
of chemistry and polymer faculty member at Rensselaer, developed
and patented a process for making pure multifunctional epoxy
siloxane resins, which are considered to be the next-generation
insulating material for a range of micro- and optoelectronics
applications.
"As it moves from
aluminum to copper interconnects, the microelectronics industry
needs new low-dielectric-constant (low-k) insulators to support
its drive to produce smaller, faster devices," says Toh-Ming
Lu. Lu is the Ray Palmer Baker Distinguished Professor of
Physics at Rensselaer and director of Rensselaer’s Center
for Advanced Interconnect Science and Technology (CAIST).
He is also the principal investigator and manager of the project.
Co-PIs on the project
are Shyam Murarka, The Elaine S. and Jack S. Parker Chair
in Engineering, and physics professor Peter Persans.
The partnership with
Polyset offers the opportunity to transfer the technology
represented by one of these patents to the multibillion-dollar
electronics industry.
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"Synergy," a term coined
to describe the flow of combined energies, talents, and sheer
strength of determination seems to describe the atmosphere
at the NYS Center for Polymer Synthesis today. Our labs are
alive with the concentrated efforts of student research work,
from unraveling the intricacies of protein design and synthesis
to using unusual materials like waste cellulose to create
polymers. At the hub of these concentrated efforts are new
faculty members, who individually represent some of the brightest
minds in the field, and who, as a team, bring a sense of forward
movement that propels all our work here.
This issue of Polymer
Perspectives is dedicated to our "new" faculty
members, some of them we welcomed on board in recent months,
others who are already considered old-timers, but in terms
of tenure are still new members of the team. They are: Yvonne
Akpalu, Christin Choma, Chang Ryu, Ravi Kane, P.M. Ajayan,
Shekhar Garde, and Wilfredo Colón. Please join me in
welcoming them to the center.
On another positive note, celebration
continues campus-wide about Rensselaer’s good fortune
in receiving an anonymous donation of $360 million. This unprecedented
gift represents the largest individual donation ever to a
university, public or private, in the country. Announced last
spring, the donation will be used, in part, to fund construction
of a biotechnology and interdisciplinary research building.
That facility will serve as a focal point in our efforts to
create links with various departments and areas of study:
nanotechnology, modeling and simulation, informatics, and
more.
One of the strengths here at
our center is the unusually high number of faculty making
new polymers that may transform the way we live or create
entirely new industries. This synthesis is the bread and butter
of our work here — to make better, project-specific molecules:
heavier, thinner, stronger, more photosensitive. The future
implications of our research are boundless, from achieving
plug-in power for fuel cells, to bio-medical applications
that could prove landmarks in diagnosing and treating disease.
We are poised in our work here at the center to break new
ground in polymer research, and our gifted faculty members
are paving the path.
We invite you to share our
excitement as work at our center continues to speed along,
opening new avenues of research, and ultimately, bringing
us within arm’s reach of applications that will enhance
people’s lives. Stay in touch for more updates.
Brian Benicewicz
Director
New York State Center for Polymer
Synthesis at Rensselaer
benice@rpi.edu
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Ajayan received his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering
from Northwestern University in 1989. After three years of
post-doctoral experience at NEC Corporation in Japan, he spent
two years as a research scientist at the CNRS Laboratoire
de Physique des Solides, Orsay in France and about a year
and a half as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut
fur Metallforschung in Stuttgart, Germany.
Ajayan’s research interests
are mainly focused on the synthesis of nanostructures —
the study of their structure and properties in relation to
size and confinement. He is one of the pioneers in the field
of carbon nanotubes and has demonstrated several possibilities
for using these quasi one-dimensional structures as templates
and molds for fabricating nanowires, composites, and novel
ceramic fibers.
Major goals of Ajayan’s
research include producing macro-assemblies made of nanostructures
for applications, understanding growth mechanisms of nanostructures,
and designing new structures and multifunctional nanocomposites.
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Prior to joining the faculty at RPI, Akpalu was a guest researcher
with Eric J. Amis at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology in Gaithersburg, MD. She obtained her B.A. in chemistry
and physics from Smith College in 1992 and her Ph.D. in polymer
science and engineering in 1998 from the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst.
Akpalu will teach a new polymer
science course in the fall of 2001, Polymer Structures and
Interfaces, focusing on the use of light, x-ray, and neutron
scattering for the study of molecular structure of the morphology
of polymeric materials.
Akpalu’s research includes
high-throughput online structural characterization, surface
and interfacial behavior, and reactive multicomponent mixtures.
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Choma obtained her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1990 from the
University of Ottawa/National Research Council of Canada.
She was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Fellowship from the Canadian government. After that, Choma
conducted postdoctoral research in protein design with William
DeGrado at DuPont Pharmaceuticals in Wilmington, Delaware.
Prior to joining the faculty at RPI, Choma was principal scientist
of the Protein Engineering Facility, University of Groningen,
the Netherlands, and research associate at the University
of Pennsylvania.
Choma is focusing her research
on designing new, completely synthetic catalytic proteins.
Because proteins are complex polymers, designing new proteins
from scratch (de novo design) is very challenging.
Unlike the process of trying to re-engineer a natural protein
for a novel application, Choma, in her research, has complete
control over the size, shape, solubility, and activity of
the designed protein catalyst. Success could mean an impact
on the bioremediation of land and water contaminated by the
mining, petroleum, and ore processing industries.
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Colón received his B.S. in chemistry from the University
of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez in 1988 and received his Ph.D.
in chemistry from Texas A&M University in 1993. After
postdoctoral research as an NSF Fellow with Heinrich Roder
at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, Colón joined the faculty
at RPI in 1997.
His areas of research
focus on molecular recognition in protein oligomerization
and aggregation, protein folding, biophysical mechanism of
amyloid formation, and protein folding defects in human diseases.
Specifically, Colón is concentrating his research on
how the proteins that comprise a human being organize themselves
into a physical organism.
Colón received an NSF
Early Career Award for $450,000 for a four-year grant studying
the mechanism of protein folding. Subsequently he received
the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
(PECASE)—NSF’s most prestigious award for outstanding
faculty early in their professional careers. Granted in January
2000, the results of Colón’s work may have practical
applications in medicine and biotechnology and could include
insight into disease-causing mutations that result in "Mad
Cow Disease" and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
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Garde received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University
of Bombay in 1992 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from
the University of Delaware in 1997. For the next two years,
he performed independent research at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory under a Director’s postdoctoral fellowship.
Using molecular simulation
and statistical mechanical tools, Garde’s research focuses
on understanding three-dimensional organization of water molecules
in the vicinity of nonpolar and polar solutes and protein
interfaces. He hopes to determine how this peculiar water
organization induces interactions between solutes of different
geometric shape and chemical nature. These water-mediated
interactions provide driving forces for proteins to fold into
unique three-dimensional structures that are responsible for
their various functions.
At Rensselaer Garde is teaching
Thermal and Fluids Engineering and Statistical Thermodynamics.
His research team is also creating simulations of molecular
dynamics that high school teachers can use to help illustrate
difficult concepts in chemical engineering to students.
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Keeping his concentration in chemical engineering, Kane received
his B.S from Stanford University in 1993 and his Ph.D. in
1998 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From there,
Kane traveled up the Charles River to Harvard, where he spent
two years as a postdoctoral fellow.
Kane has served as a teaching
assistant for courses in fluid mechanics and has worked with
Dow Corning Company. His research at that time focused on
the development of an ASPEN model for a train of distillation
columns to increase product throughput and purity.
Kane’s research at Rensselaer
includes polyvalency, biosurface chemistry, biophysical studies
using capillary electrophoresis and surface plasmon resonance
spectroscopy, and the patterning of proteins using soft lithography.
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Ryu received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees
in chemical technology from the Seoul National University
in Korea. Before moving to the United States, Ryu worked as
a researcher in the polymer processing laboratory at the Korea
Institute of Science and Technology.
Crossing the Pacific, Ryu moved
to the Midwest to pursue his Ph.D. in chemical engineering
at the University of Minnesota. During that time, Ryu also
taught classes in materials energy balances and numerical
analysis for chemical engineers. He graduated in 1998. Crossing
the country one more time, Ryu served as a postdoctoral assistant
at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the direction
of professors Ed Kramer and Glenn Fredrickson.
At Rensselaer, Ryu’s research
focuses on the structure and dynamics of self-assembling macromolecules.
Last year, he presented his research on the self-assembly
of multicolor block co-polymers at the March meeting of the
American Physical Society in Minneapolis.
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NOTICE:
Beginning with next issue, Polymer Perspectiveswill
be distributed via e-mail and at this web address only. Those
wishing to continue their subscriptions should send an e-mail
to: polymers@rpi.edu
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Tom Apple
Brian C. Benicewicz
James Crivello
Leonard V. Interrante
Sonja Krause
James A. Moore
Chan Chung
Linda Schadler
Sandy Sternstein
Georges Belfort
Steven Cramer
Jonathan Dordick
Bruce Nauman
Toh-Ming Lu
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Brian C. Benicewicz
Director, The New York State Center for Polymer Synthesis
Professor, Department of Chemistry
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
Phone: 518.276.2534
Fax: 518.276.6434
E-mail: benice@rpi.edu
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