Nanocolloquium: Sharon C. Glotzer - Designing Materials for Self-Assembly: The Shape of Things...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Chem & Nuc Eng Building, 2110
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The Maryland NanoCenter presents nanocolloquium:

Designing Materials for Self-Assembly: The Shape(s) of Things to Come

Sharon C. Glotzer

Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering and

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Refreshments served at 11AM

Nanoparticles and colloids comprise a new generation of materials building blocks because of their diversity of shape, material and size, and because they can be patterned and functionalized down to molecular scales with tailored and programmable interactions. The ability to create designer particles opens up exciting opportunities for building blocks designed for self-assembly and even reconfigurability. We show how computer simulations play a critical role in elucidating how particle shape, interactions, and programmability can be exploited to achieve a high propensity for self-assembly into complex structures, including sheets, wires, helices, and shells, as well as complex ionic colloidal crystals and quasicrystals. We discuss the packing and assembly of tetrahedra, the patterning and assembly of patchy particles, and the engineering of assembly pathways.

Sharon C. Glotzer is the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Director of Research Computing in the UM College of Engineering. She also holds faculty appointments in Physics, Applied Physics, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering. She received a B.S. in physics from UCLA and a Ph.D. in physics from Boston University. Prior to Michigan, she worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where she co-founded and directed the Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science. Her research focuses on computational nanoscience and simulation of soft matter, self-assembly and materials design, and computational science and engineering, and is sponsored by the DoD, DoE, NSF, and the J.S. McDonnell Foundation. She oversees a group of 25 PhD and postdoctoral students, has over 140 archival papers, and has given over 200 invited and keynote lectures. Dr. Glotzer is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and holds a prestigious National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship from the DoD. She has served on the National Academies’ Solid State Sciences Committee; Technology Warning and Surprise study committee; Biomolecular Materials and Processes study committee; Modeling, Simulation, and Games study committee; and serves on the TIGER Committee on Defense Intelligence. She is involved in roadmapping and strategic planning activities on computational science and engineering, including chairing a pan-agency sponsored International Assessment of R&D in Simulation-based Engineering & Science (SBE&S), and co-chairing a research directions roadmapping effort in SBE&S for the National Science Foundation. She is also the co-founding director of a new Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering under the auspices of the NSF-funded Blue Waters Petascale Computing Project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). She currently serves as the Director of Research Computing for the University of Michigan College of Engineering, and is the founding director of the UM Institute for Computational Science & Engineering.

This Event is For: Graduate • Faculty • Post-Docs