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3:30 p.m.
in Room 307 of the Optical Sciences Meinel Building
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Speaker: |
Pulickel Ajayan
Rice University |
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Title: |
Engineering at the Nanoscale; Future
and Challenges |
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Host: |
Jayan Thomas |
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Abstract: |
The
talk will focus on approaches used to engineer materials at the
nanoscale for various applications in future technologies. In
particular, the case of carbon nanotubes will be used to
highlight the challenges and progress. Various organized
architectures of nanotubes can be fabricated using relatively
simple processes and the work in attaining control on the
directed assembly of these structures will be discussed. Some of
these structures offer excellent opportunity to probe novel
nanoscale behavior; however, when it comes to engineering such
materials into precise architectures, challenges remain. We have
pursued several novel applications for these materials, taking
into account their multifunctional properties. Some of these
promising applications of nanotubes and nanotube-hybrids will be
reviewed from the perspective of what has been accomplished in
recent years. Our efforts on the strategies of growth and
manipulation of nanomaterials and some of our recent successes
in controllably fabricating heterogeneous and complex
nanostructures will be highlighted.
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Bio: |
Professor Ajayan earned his B. Tech in metallurgical engineering
from Banaras Hindu University in 1985 and 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
Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Orsay in France and nearly
a year and a half as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the
Max-Planck-Institut fur Metallforschung, Stuttgart in Germany.
In 1997, he joined the materials science and engineering faculty
at Rensselaer as an Assistant Professor and was the Henri
Burlage chair Professor in Engineering until 2007. He joined the
mechanical engineering and materials science department of Rice
University, as the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson
Professor in Engineering from July 2007. Professor Ajayan's
research interests include synthesis and structure-property
relations of nanostructures and nanocomposites, materials
science and applications of nanomaterials and phase stability in
nanoscale systems. He is one of the pioneers in the field of
carbon nanotubes and was involved in the early work on the topic
along with the NEC group. He has published one book and 330
journal papers with more than ~20,500 citations and an h-index
of 72. He has given more than 250 invited talks including
several keynote and plenary lectures in more than 20 countries.
Ajayan has received several awards including the Senior Humboldt
Prize, 2006 MRS medal, Scientific American 50 recognition in
2006, RPI senior research award (2003), the Burton award from
the microscopic society of America (1997) and the Hadfield medal
for the outstanding metallurgist in India (1985). He has been
elected as a fellow of AAAS and to the Mexican Academy of
Sciences. He is on the advisory editorial board of several
materials science and nanotechnology journals and on the boards
of several nanotech companies. |
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