Smalley-Curl Institute honors top posters, presentations at summer colloquium

The fourth annual Smalley-Curl Institute Summer Research Colloquium filled the lobby at Duncan Hall with people and posters on Aug. 10. (Photo courtesy of the Smalley-Curl Institute)

Smalley-Curl Institute honors top posters, presentations at summer colloquium

Prizes were awarded to students judged to have the best presentations and posters at the Smalley-Curl Institute’s fourth annual Summer Research Colloquium Aug. 10 in Duncan Hall. The winners were chosen from graduate and postdoctoral students and undergraduate students, as well as students in the Nakatani Research and International Experiences for Students (RIES) program, the Smalley-Curl Institute-Student Training for Advising Research (SCI-STAR) program, the Rice Office of STEM Engagement (R-STEM) program and other visiting undergraduate scholars working in labs at Rice for the summer. For more details about the awards, visit https://sci.rice.edu/colloquium.

Graduate student oral presentations

Morgan Barnes (Materials Science and NanoEngineering) for “Flat Sheets to 3D Images and Back: Programming Shape-Shifting Elastomers into Flowers, Faces and More”; Aswathy Girija (Electrical and Computer Engineering) for “Trace Gas Sensing Using Infrared Spectroscopy”; David Leach (Chemistry) for “STINGel: A Biomaterial-Based Drug Delivery Vehicle for Enhanced Cancer Immunotherapy,” and Lauren Warning (Chemistry) for “Probing Interfacial Bovine Serum Albumin Unfolding With Single Molecule High Resolution Imaging With Photobleaching.”

Undergraduate poster session awards

Nicola Knowles (SCI-STAR – Chemistry) for “Ammonia Production through Plasmon-Mediated Solar Chemical Looping,” and Kenneth Lin (Nakatani RIES Fellowship Program) for “Ultrafast Carrier Dynamics of Exfoliated Transition Metal Dichalcogenides with Optical-Pump Terahertz-Probe Microscopy.”

People’s choice

Mariana Lopez Martinolich (RSTEM Research Experience for Undergraduates) for “Constrained Semiflexible Colloid Chain Buckling and Chain Relaxation.”

Honorable mention

Mingee Kim (SCI-STAR – Applied Physics/Materials Science and NanoEngineering) for “Overcoming Biological Barriers in Drug Delivery: Tumor Flow & Vasculature Characterization for Improved iNPG Design”; Cierra Weathers (Undergraduate Summer Internship) for “Improving Membrane Capacitive Deionization Technology Using Sulfonated Pentablock Copolymer”; Daniel Caña (RSTEM Research Experience for Undergraduates) for “Carbon Nanotube Wires for High Fidelity AC Signal Transfer”; Jasmine Zhou (SCI-STAR – Applied Physics/Electrical and Computer Engineering), “Whole-Brain Imaging of Brief Sleep States in C. Elegans.”

Graduate poster session awards

Hossein Robatjazi (Electrical and Computer Engineering) for “Aluminum Nanocrystals @ Metal-Organic Frameworks: A New Addition for Sustainable Plasmonics.”

Didier Devaurs (Computer Science) for “General Prediction of Peptide-MHC Binding Modes Using Incremental Docking.”

People’s choice

Yiyuan “Ben” Yin (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) for “Hydrogen Peroxide Production from Hydroxylamine Using Palladium-Decorated Gold Nanoparticle.”

Honorable mention

Gisele Calderon (Bioengineering) for “Toward Geometrically Guided Angiogenesis in 3D Printed, Perfusable Vascularized Hydrogels”; Nitant Gupta (Materials Science and NanoEngineering) for “Crystallographic Selectivity in the Growth of Graphene and Nanotubes”; Rashad Baiyasi (Electrical and Computer Engineering) for “PSF Distortion in Dye – Plasmonic Nanomaterial Systems: Friend or Foe?”; Thomas Heiderscheit (Chemistry) for “Investigating Gold Nanoparticle Shape and Size Dependence for Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence.”