News

On September 11^th, MEM-C hosted its 2^nd annual “MEM-C Day” on UW-Seattle’s campus. During the event, MEM-C had the pleasure of hosting 23 students and 9 parents from the greater-Seattle homeschooling community for a day of hands-on science experiments. A group of 17 graduate students from the Cossairt, Golder, Reed, and Xiao labs led the students through interactive activities that showcased how nanoscale structures facilitate macroscopic properties, including color and long-range structural integrity. This outreach event was hosted in a UW Department of Chemistry teaching laboratory, which offered these young students the experience of navigating within a real lab space.

The day’s programming started with the Golder group teaching students how to prepare polymer networks that, with enough stirring, turn into bouncy balls. The elasticity of the bouncy balls changes by altering the ratios of various ingredients. 

Next up was the Cossiart lab, whose members helped the students prepare gold nanoparticles by simply combining two ingredients in water. Unlike bulk gold we are used to seeing, these nanoparticles appear pink or purple in solution, telling us about the size of these individual nanoparticles and how these particles interact with light. 

The Reed lab then had the students explore how light interacts with materials, depending on the thickness of that material. Students were able to design their own bookmarks that would then have a thin layer of clear nail polish deposited on top. Because of the way this ultra-thin layer of nail polish reflects light, an iridescent rainbow is deposited on top of the students’ creations.

To finish off a full day of science, the Xiao lab worked with the students to build models of porous molecules out of marshmallows and toothpicks to learn about the crystal structure of materials. To further understand materials at the nanoscale, students then wrote messages with “invisible” ink. Upon heating up their seemingly blank papers with a blow-dryer, their message would appear as the water molecules left the ink structure and the newly colored structure would reveal itself. 

A MEM-C Day parent sent this follow-up note: “Thank you so much for hosting this event. It really jump sparked my son into loving science even more. On the way home he ordered materials so he could recreate some of the experiments you did.”

MEM-C Day was organized by Prof. Matthew Golder, Prof. Andrea Carroll, MEM-C Education and Training Fellow Eden Tzanetopoulos, a Ph.D. student in the Gamelin lab, and Matt Elardo and Lucy Miller, both Ph.D. students in the Golder lab. We’d like to thank the volunteers, students, and parents for making this year’s MEM-C Day such a success! 

MEM-C caught the ferry to San Juan Island and headed to UW’s Friday Harbor Labs (FHL) this week for the All Hands meeting and retreat. The meeting was held September 4^th through the 6^th and there were over 50 MEM-C participants in attendance: 30 graduate students, 6 postdoctoral scholars, and 20 faculty members. The meeting included poster sessions, research talks by students and postdocs, education and outreach meetings, professional development, and strategy sessions. Most importantly, the retreat carved out lots of time for MEM-C participants to get to know each other in order to inspire future research collaborations!

Several honored guests join this year’s meeting. UH’s MRE-C PREM Director, Prof. Godwin Severa, Sustainability Thrust Lead, Prof. Przemek Dera, and AI Thrust Lead, Prof. Joseph Brown, joined their MEM-C collaboators at All Hands. Their effor to make the trip also provided the opportunity to have PREM-specific strategy sessions and presentations. Additionally, MEM-C External Advisory Board member and WSU faculty Prof. Kevin Kittilstved traveled across the state to attend the entire meeting. The meeting also provided the opportunity for MEM-C’s evaluator team, led by Erin Carll from UW CERSE, to introduce the evaluation plan to the entire center and launch the first-year internal assesment survey.

Another special aspect of this year’s meeting was a welcome and information session given by FHL Director Megan Dethier followed by FHL docent-led tours of Friday Harbor Lab’s marine biology facilities. Also, the Outreach Director at FHL, Michelle Herko, and MEM-C Education Director, Andrea Carroll, had a meeting during the week for information and best practices sharing. This allowed the MEM-C All Hands meeting to be more place-based and inspired all kinds of wonder and appreciation for the land, critters and people that make FHL such a wonderful place.

The NSF announced today that UW MEM·C’s PREM awards with the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UHM) and the University of Central Florida (UCF) are 2 of only 11 institutions nationwide selected for six-year PREM funding in the latest round of competition, placing UW, UHM and UCF in rare and distinguished company! UHM and UCF are each the primary awardees of a six-year, $4.2M award and UW is a subawardee on each award. These PREM awards are focused on expanding participation and access to materials science-focused facilities, education, training and careers at minority-serving institutions. MEM·C is so proud of our partners and collaborators! Their hard work at leading these PREMs is a huge benefit to all of our institutions.

At UCF, the PREM award will fund the Center for Quantum Material Innovations and Educational Excellence (CQ-MIEE, DMR-2424976) and the MEM-C faculty joining that effort include Ting Cao (UW’s CQ-MIEE Director), Daniel Gamelin, Xiaosong Li, Andrea Carroll, Jiun-Haw Chu, Brandi Cossairt, Jim De Yoreo, Juan Carlos Idrobo, Alexandra Velian and Matthew Yankowitz. CQ-MIEE’s research focus will be quantum material synthesis for energy-efficient communications, novel chemicals and new medicines. Each year, MEM·C will host visiting undergraduates and graduate students from UCF to do summer research alongside our students and faculty.

At UHM, the PREM award will fund the Materials Research and Education Consortium (MRE-C, DMR-2424949) and the MEM-C faculty joining that effort include Lilo Pozzo (UW’s MRE-C Director), Daniel Gamelin, Xiaosong Li, Andrea Carroll, Brandi Cossairt, Jim De Yoreo, Dianne Xiao, Scott Dunham, Juan Carlos Idrobo, Stefan Stoll, and Alexandra Velian. Beyond just the limits of MEM-C, this PREM collaboration expands to other UW faculty including Julie Rorrer, Eleftheria Roumeli, Zach Sherman and Vincent Holmberg. MRE-C’s research focus will be clean energy and sustainability solutions for challenges facing Hawaii, including reliance on imported fuels for electricity and transportation, resource and waste management, soil erosion, and ocean contamination exacerbated by climate change. Each year, MEM·C will host visiting undergraduates and graduate students from UCF to do summer research alongside our students and faculty.

We look forward to 6 more fruitful years of PREM activities at UW!

MEM-C is lucky to be hosting a large group of visiting researchers at UW Seattle this summer!

Last week, our group of MEM-C REU students, UCF PREM visiting student, and UH PREM visiting students arrived for their 9 week summer research experiences. There are 17 total undergrads in this summer’s group, and they are already off to a busy start with orienting to their host research groups and journal clubs. This week they are all attending the ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium which is being hosted here at UW Seattle.

Prof. Remi Beaulac from Swarthmore College arrived earlier this month. Remi is joining us as a MEM-C Visiting Scholar and is conducting research with the Gamelin Group. He is familiar with the group and this area since he did his postdoctoral work here at UW!

This week our Research Experience for Teachers (RET) participant arrived to campus. Our RET is a K-12 teacher from Honolulu and will be very busy these next 3 weeks with our Education Director Andrea Carroll as they work together on a project focused on integrating of Hawai’ian culture and community into the contexts for the outreach activities so that, in partnership with the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, NanoCamp can be extended to the local youth community in and around Honolulu.

Next week, we are getting ready to host our two-week NanoCamp here in Seattle in partnership with UW Youth and Teen Programs. And we’ll be joined by a high school intern from our UH PREM partners who will be working on a project to get teens more excited about nanoscience.

Three MEM-C faculty have recieved big awards this spring!

• Brandi Cossairt was recently named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Brandi is among 502 newly elected fellows from around the world, who are recognized for their “scientifically and socially distinguished achievements” in science and engineering.
• Dianne Xiao has been recognized with a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award. Dianne is one of 18 faculty members honored this year nationwide, who are awarded for having “created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education.”
• Xiaosong Li is this year’s awardee of the ACS 2024 Jack Simons Award in Theoretical Physical Chemistry. Each year, only a single ACS faculty member is given this distinction for “outstanding contributions in theoretical chemistry.”

This week IRG-1 held a special meeting for an informal but very informational session with our international guests Ivan Infante from the Basque Center for Materials, Applications & Nanostructures and Zeger Hens from the University of Ghent who were in Seattle for MRS. Ivan shared with us his latest research and gave a talk “The Surface Chemistry of Colloidal Semiconductor Quantum Dots”. Here’s the abstract:

Despite significant progress in recent years in understanding the chemical reactions occurring on the surfaces of II-VI, III-V, and lead halide perovskite quantum dots (QDs), there are still fundamental questions that remain unanswered regarding the nature of QD surfaces, QD-ligand interactions, and the formation of trap states. Addressing these aspects is crucial for enhancing the optoelectronic efficiency of QDs. To tackle these challenges, an essential step is the utilization of first principle simulations to analyze QD surfaces. Traditional simulations have been limited by their restricted system size, typically confined to a few hundred atoms, and their focus on static properties without considering dynamic effects. In this seminar, I will present a pioneering multiscale modeling approach that combines Density Functional Theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations. This approach encompasses QDs ranging from small to real-sized QDs passivated with oleate ligands and immersed in organic solvents. Through this methodology, we gain invaluable insights into the surface characteristics and the binding energies of ligands under different experimental conditions. This methodology not only provides a deeper understanding of the intricate behavior of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals but also paves the way for future advancements in their diverse applications.

MEM-C is finally on Instagram! Our IG has launched thanks to Chun-Chi Tseng and Xuetao Ma from Matt Yankowitz’s group. So, for now IRG-2 has the reigns on our posts!

MEM-C’s IRG-2 was busy last week with back-to-back seminars from some phenomenal visitors! Last Tuesday IRG-2 hosted Hu Miao, a researcher at Oakridge National Laboratory who brought us a presentation on his great work on correlated and topological quantum materials using ARPES and X-ray scattering.

The title of Hu’s talk was “Chiral density waves in correlated quantum materials” and his abstract was:

Chirality, a geometrical concept that distinguishes an object from its mirror image, has been proposed for over three decades as a potential mechanism for novel quantum states including spontaneous quantum Hall liquids, chiral spin liquids, and magnetic skyrmions. Recently, chirality has experienced a revival in the context of correlated and geometrically frustrated electronic systems. In these settings, chiral spin, charge, orbital, and pairing fields become strongly coupled, giving rise to intertwined orders and long-range entangled quasiparticles. In this talk, I will present our recent progress and understanding of chiral charge, spin and pair density waves.

Last Thursday, many IRG-2 members attended a special seminar hosted by UW’s Department of Physics and the UW Thouless Institute for Quantum Matter. The special guest was Prof. Sanfeng Wu from Princeton. This seminar was very special for IRG-2 for many reasons! First and foremost, Prof. Wu is a UW almuni and former member of Xiaodong Xu’s group. Sanfeng’s PhD committee included Xiaodongl of coruse, and also IRG-2 Prof. Dave Cobden. His dissertation in 2016 was on 2D materials (near and dear to IRG-2’s heart) and defended just a couple of years before Cobden and Xu pubished MEM-C’s most highly cited research paper to-date in Nature on the incredible properties of 2D WTe₂, “Ferroelectric switching of a two-dimensional metal“. Research in this area continues in both MEM-C and Sangeng’s reseach group at Princeton where he is a member of Princeton’s Center for Complex Materials which is also a NSF-funded MRSEC!

The title of Sangfeng’s presenation last week at UW was, “Unconventional Superconducting Quantum Criticality in Monolayer WTe₂” and his abstract was:

Quantum critical points associated with quantum phase transitions are highly intriguing states of matter; yet they are difficult to study. An example is the superconductor to insulator or metal transition in two dimensions (2D), a topic of interest in condensed matter research for decades , but many problems remain unsolved. In this talk, I will discuss our recent experimental finding of a quantum critical point in monolayer tungsten ditelluride (WTe₂), a unique 2D crystal in which topology, strong correlations and superconductivity all occur in a single material. We directly measure superconducting quantum fluctuations, whose behaviors are so anomalous that an unusual explanation beyond established theories is required.

Earlier this month, MEM-C brought materials science–in the form of milk–to Echo Lake Elementary! The colorful (and slightly gross) activity involves milk, food dye, and dishsoap. It shows how the consituents of the milk (esp. the fats) are affected by soap! MEM-C graduate students William Bittner (Stoll Group), Eric Lester (Cobden Group) and Xueta Ma (Yankowitz Group) volunteered their time and Echo Lake PTA reported that they counted 253 students (and an estimated total of ~430 people) attending the event!

By Michael Riehs, PhD Student UW Chemistry

On November 29^th, UW MEM-C had the pleasure of participating at Cedar Crest Academy’s Upper Elementary Family Engineering Night for 2^nd – 5^th graders. The event brought over 85 students and family members together to explore science with hands on activities offered by a few UW outreach programs and Cedar Crest Academy faculty and staff. Graduate students from UW MEM-C organized two activities focusing on the nanoscale that could be implemented with a few materials in a classroom setting.  

Michael Riehs from the Velian lab (Chemistry) and William Bittner from the Stoll lab (Chemistry) helped students learn how to use graphite from pencils to draw a conductive path for a circuit to light up an LED. Students were able to draw any design and test the effects on the circuit, highlighting how a thin conductive path can be made with a simple material and how one can even obtain conductivity with a single-atom thick layer of graphite called graphene.  

Christian Pederson from the Fu lab (Physics) and Andrea Carroll (UW MEM-C Education Director) helped participants explore the colloidal aspect of chemistry in everyday materials in an activity dubbed “milk volcanoes.” This activity involved adding a few drops of food dye to a small bowl of whole milk and then adding a drop of dish soap. 

The different chemical compositions of the milk (fats, proteins, and water) and the soap (molecules with polar (hydrophilic) heads and non-polar (hydrophobic) tails) were discussed.  As soon as the soap was added, the dye was quickly carried away from its starting location due to the intermolecular interactions between the soap molecules and the non-polar fats and polar proteins and water. The students enjoyed seeing the bright colors quickly move along the surface of the milk and create mesmerizing patterns that continued to evolve for more than ten minutes.   

Throughout the event, the nanoscale aspect of each activity was emphasized, and students thoroughly enjoyed seeing how materials they use every day can yield interesting properties when discussed at the nanoscale.