Special Notices

West Virginia University recently sent two graduate students to the 22nd National NSF EPSCoR conference in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to represent the state of West Virginia in the Student Poster Session.

Ming Li, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering working with Dr. Nick Wu, presented a poster entitled, “Energy Transfer of Fluorescent CdSe/ZnS Quantum Dots and Gold Nanoparticles and its Applications for Mercuric (II) Ion Detection.” Size dependent energy transport properties between gold nanoparticles and fluorescent quantum dots were investigated in this work; the quenching efficiency of fluorescence emission of quantum dots was found to increase with an increase in gold nanoparticle size. Li’s work was supported by NSF CBET-0754405, with partial support by NSF RII grant (EPS 1003907) and a Research Challenge Grant from the State of West Virginia (EPS08-01), the West Virginia University Research Corporation and the West Virginia EPSCoR Office.

Graduate student and WVNano Graduate Fellow Nicole Shamitko-Klingensmith (left), from the C. Eugene Bennett Department of Chemistry, won the Grand Prize (Other category) for her poster, “Mapping the mechanical properties of surfaces in solution with nanometer resolution: Applications for biology,” with co-author Kelley Wambaugh and advisor Dr. Justin Legleiter. Her work focused on using scanning probe acceleration microscopy (SPAM) to determine the effects of temperature and cholesterol on the mechanical properties of total brain lipid extract bilayers. Nicole’s work was supported by the Brodie Discovery and Innovation fund, the WVNano Initiative and NSF 1003907.