Six faculty and graduate students from Louisiana Tech's Institute for Micromanufacturing presented their research on nanotechnology at the 236th national meeting of the American Chemical Society held recently in Philadelphia.

More than 200 scientists from around the world attended a session organized by Tech's Dr. Yuri Lvov, a professor of chemistry, and Dr. Michael Rubner, a professor of polymer materials science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The session was titled “Nanoassembly: From Fundamental to Applications.”

Lvov said Tech was asked to help organize the session because “we are recognized as leaders in this field.”

“Before this program was announced we were a world leader in this little known lis order

area of chemistry,” he said.

Lvov made a presentation on clay nanotubes for corrosion protection. Also representing Tech on the panel were Dr. Tabbetha Dobbins, an assistant professor of physics, who delivered a talk on non-aqueous nanoassembly for hydrogen storage materials; Dr. Pedro Derosa, an assistant professor of chemistry, who discussed multi-scale modeling of conductive polymers; and Dr. Mangilal Agarwal, a researcher at IfM, led a discussion on conductive paper.

Tech graduate students representing IfM and biomedical engineering were Zhiguo Zheng and Shantanu Balkundi. They presented seven poster reports on nanostructured materials.

ACS national meetings are among the largest science meetings in the nation where scholars from around the world meet to discuss and compare research. Altogether, this Tech team of researchers presented 11 papers on nanomaterials.

Written by Reginald Owens