Smalley-Curl Institute honors presentations at annual summer colloquium

Awards were given to students with the best presentation at the 2019 Smalley-Curl Institute Summer Research Colloquium. From left: back, Pratiksha Dongare, Yilin Li, SCI Executive Director Alberto Pimpinelli, Nicholas Moringo, Danyel Eduardo Cavazos and Takuma Makihara; and front, Sohee Park, Sueda Cetinkaya, Douglas Walker, chemical and biomolecular engineering Assistant Professor Amanda Marciel, Tania Lopez Silva and Sarah Hahn Hulgan. Photo courtesy of the Smalley-Curl Institute

Student and postdoctoral researchers earned prizes for the best presentations and posters at the Smalley-Curl Institute’s fifth annual Summer Research Colloquium Aug. 9 in Duncan Hall. For more details about the event, visit https://sci.rice.edu/colloquium.

Graduate student oral presentations

Nicholas Moringo (Chemistry), “A Mechanistic Examination of Salting Out in Protein-Polymer Membrane Interactions.”

Takuma Makihara (Physics and Astronomy), “Probing Coherent Terahertz Magnons in YFeO3 in High Magnetic Fields for Ultrafast Antiferromagnetic Spintronics.”

Yilin Li (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), “A Copolymer Strategy to Improve the Performance of Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Polymeric Cathodes.”

Tania Lopez Silva (Chemistry), “Chemical Functionality of Multidomain Peptide Hydrogels Governs Early Host Immune Responses.”

Xiaoyu Lu (Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology), “Engineering Mind-Reading Biosensors: High-Throughput Development of Voltage Indicators for in Vivo Neuroimaging.”

Pratiksha Dongare (Applied Physics), “Resonant Heat Transfer for Solar Thermal Desalination.”

Benjamin Clark, “Aluminum Nanocubes Have Sharp Corners.”

Danyel Eduardo Cavazos Cavazos (Physics and Astronomy), “Measurement of 3-Body Losses in a Quasi-1d 6li Gas Near a P-Wave Feshbach Resonance.”

Undergraduate poster session awards

Sueda Cetinkaya (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), “Engineering Thermo- and Photo-Responsive Fluidic Pumps Using Liquid Crystal Elastomers.”

Sohee Park (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), “Preparation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Redox Conjugated Polymers as Cathodes).”

Graduate/postdoctoral poster session awards 

Douglas Walker (Chemistry), “Understanding Collagen Interactions to Predict the Stability of Collagen-Mimetic Peptides.”

Ali Khater (Materials Science and Nanoengineering), “Highly Dispersed Carbon Nanotube Epoxy by 3D Printing.”

Benjamin Cerjan (Electrical and Computer Engineering), “Scalable Plasmonic Metasurfaces.”

Sarah Hahn Hulgan (Chemistry), “Covalent Capture of the Collagen Triple Helix.”