Events

ABSTRACT:  Human civilization has been driven by harvest and utilization of solar energy.  Developing better technologies leading to more effective energy harvest and utilization is being emerged as one of the most essential research themes.  In this presentation, two topics, energy storage and protein therapeutics, will be covered.  The first topic will focus on design and fabrication of electrochemical devices such as supercapacitors, batteries, and fuel cells.  Recognize that living organisms are made from basic elements (e.g., C, O, H, N and P), consume energy and repro

ABSTRACT:   Polymeric materials are ubiquitous in the modern world, finding use in everything from coffee cups to truck beds to drug-eluting stents and carbon-fiber reinforced aircraft components. As our demands of these materials increase, the need for improved properties, added functionality and advanced manufacturing processes grows, and the elucidation and application of key composition-structure-processing-properties relations becomes increasingly critical.

ABSTRACT:  While we have isolated and regenerated celluloses for textile applications since the turn of the century (e.g. viscose), nature continues to offer new insights into how we could reintegrate biodiversity and heterogeneity into cellulose-based materials as a means of modulating its physico-chemical properties. Cellulose is one of the most abundant organic polymers on earth and serves as an important structural component of the cell walls of plants.

ABSTRACT:  Truly rational design has been a major goal of bioengineering for some time. And while certain aspects of genetic engineering have become more predictable, the need for information about cellular behaviour has only continued to grow. The availability of genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic data has opened the door to the synthesis of multiple levels of information in biological research.

ABSTRACT:  The current drug development process is both very slow (15 year average) and costly ($1.5B/drug average). Despite this hefty investment, inefficiencies in the drug screening process routinely result in the withdrawal of drugs from the market due to serious toxicities and adverse cardiovascular effects. Safety screen assessments performed on cell cultures and animal models do not always correlate with clinical risk.

ABSTRACT: The increasing demand, cost escalation and environmental impact of raw materials for industrial chemicals, materials, and energy production impel the development of sustainable strategies for resource utilization. Such sustainable resource demand spurred investigation for the utilization of agricultural and forestry wastes and by-products. The emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy reduced most of the traditional uses of rendered animal meals such as blood meal, meat, and bone meal as animal feed, effectively making it an industrial waste.

ABSTRACT:   While multiple types of smart, environmentally-responsive materials have been explored for a variety of biomedical applications (e.g. drug delivery, tissue engineering, bioimaging, etc.), their ultimate clinical use has been hampered by their lack of biologically-relevant degradation as well as challenges regarding their non-surgical administration to the body.  These factors have particularly limited the clinical use of temperature-responsive hydrogels, which are either highly labile in diluting environments like the body (e.g.

ABSTRACT:  Thermal plasma (TP) reactors are used extensively for the generation of particles having specific compositions or phase structures, while nanoparticles (NPs) are also being generated using precursors that are either in the gas phase, in liquid solutions or even sometimes in the solid phase. More difficult is the controlled homogeneous nucleation of pure nanomaterials, or controlled two-step systems for heterogeneous nucleation of materials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs). One material of strong interest is the bi-dimensional structure of graphene.

ABSTRACT:  One of the grand challenges facing humanity today is the development of an alternative energy system that is safe, clean, and sustainable and where combustion of fossil fuels no longer dominates. A distributed renewable electrochemical energy and mobility system (DREEMS) could meet this challenge. At the foundation of this new energy system, we have chosen to study a number of electrochemical devices including fuel cells, electrolyzers, and flow batteries.

ABSTRACT:  In total Duane has almost 20 years of experience in fluid flow, heat and mass transfer analysis, nuclear thermal-hydraulics, energy system analysis and design. Duane is a mechanical engineer with Masters’degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering, both from University of Waterloo. After graduation Duane started his career in CFD modeling in Waterloo working for CFX, which later was later acquired by Ansys, supporting CFX users, giving training courses, and doing multi-phase, turbulence and combustion validations.