Research Interests

Advisor

Physical Chemistry Research Interests

Dr. Samir Anz

The main aspects of my research involve the study of electron-hole recombinations in nano-scale materials, and the rapidly growing science of the properties of nano-phase materials and MEMS, the growth and/or etching of the underlying material must be understood.

Low energy Electron Enhanced Etching (LE4) is a relatively new procedure for etching materials and produces high-fidelity features in materials. My research can thus be divided into two categories. The first pertains to understanding the chemical processes and kinetic mechanisms, which are involved in the LE4 etching of semiconductors. The second is the commercialization of LE4 and the development of fabrication protocols that will produce the desired features for MEMS applications

Dr. Timothy C. Corcoran

My research seeks to uncover new jewels in the well-known area of fluorescence, with a strong emphasis on its applications in clinical medicine and biotechnology.

Biology and clinical medicine have become sciences which depend on ever-increasing amounts of information.  This demand cannot rationally be met without lowering costs and increasing throughput, that is, getting more bang for the buck. Fluorescent labels have become a very important method for extracting qualitative and quantitative information in a number of contexts, such as fluorescent microscopy, electrophoresis, microarrays and flow cytometry. Our work centers on overcoming some of the limits of current fluorescence analysis methods in these areas by adapting excitation emission matrices, a method from analytical chemistry to meet the particular challenges imposed by rapid-flowing samples and 2-dimensional imaging. Utilizing some very new technology in lasers and spectroscopy, we hope to develop a family of instruments capable of being developed into commercial instruments which can significantly improve on current practice in both in performance and economics.

Dr. Charles Millner

A number of projects are underway in the general area of paints, coatings, inks, adhesives, and pigments. These projects are of a primarily applied nature and in close association with various commercial/industrial partners, particularly the paint industry. These projects are very specific in nature and usually independent of one another being specifically designed to answer question of special concern to particular industries. A feeling for the basic flavor of these projects may be obtained by a consideration of some of the more recent projects undertaken:

•development of analytical methods to measure water content of latex paints
•investigation of stream and pond contamination from spray painting of bridges
•developing and testing protocols for statistical quality control of manufacturing processes
•developing and testing statistical color matching methods including computerization
•investigation of corrosion protection strategies and assessments

Those interested in becoming involved in the micelle type studies should have finished their Physical Chemistry courses and Math courses before commencing work. The applied projects are considerably more interdisciplinary in nature and do not necessarily require completion of your Physical Chemistry courses. Generally speaking a minimum of Quantitative Analysis and at least one quarter of Organic Chemistry would be required in order to undertake some of the applied projects. Projects can be tailored to fulfill either Senior Project or Special Problems curriculum requirements. In addition, it is also entirely appropriate to configure projects to fit in with the Cooperative Education experience. These Co-op education projects need to be closely coordinated with the Cooperative Education Program through Dr. Simpson.

The focus of our research group is to develop and utilize quantitatively based computational techniques to study problems of chemical and biochemical interest. Current areas of investigation include ab initio membrane protein structure prediction, reactive biomolecular force field development, mixed QM/MM simulations of membrane protein-lipid interactions, and MD simulations of non-adiabatic chemical processes using time dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT). We perform these massively parallel simulations on PolyQuanta, our state-of-the art, 64 processor high performance computing cluster loaded with Amber, Gaussian, GaussView, Gromacs, Jaguar, NAMD, PyMol, and VMD.

Undergraduate and graduate students in the group have the opportunity to work on stimulating projects within a collaborative team environment while expanding their knowledge base of quantum and statistical mechanics, biochemistry, advanced mathematics, and computer programming. Additionally, students are encouraged to hone their oral presentation and technical writing skills by presenting the results of their research at major scientific conferences prior to publication. We maintain active collaborations with experimental biophysicists, organic chemists, and materials scientists both within the university and the greater international scientific community. Please peruse our group webpage for more information and feel free to contact me to discuss projects of mutual interest.

Dr. Xuehe Zheng