June 29 – Wednesday – 11 am – Summer Active Matter Seminar series.

Johnson Auditorium.  Coffee/cookies in the Physics common area before the talk.

Title: Active Fluids : Applying the tools of soft materials theory to
biological systems

Speaker: Professor Aparna Baskaran, Physics Department, Brandeis University

Active fluids are made up of particle units that consume energy from
internal or external sources and dissipate it by moving through the
medium they inhabit. This paradigm unifies such varied systems as
actin-motor mixtures, bacterial swarms and bird flocks. The key
difference of these systems from conventional non equilibrium systems
is that the energy input that drives the system out of equilibrium is
at the level of each unit rather than through a global body force or a
driving at the boundary of the system. In this talk, I will illustrate
the consequences of this microscopic energy input to emergent behavior
by considering three phenomena exhibited by these systems –
rectification, enhanced ordering and exotic pattern formation.

June 8. Wednesday, 11:00 am – Noon.  Active Matter Seminar
Location: Sackler Sciences Center, Room S-120 – Johnson Auditorium

Title: Parametrization and Graph Algorithms for Multibody Configurational Problems

Speaker: Professor Li Han, Ph.D.
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Clark University

Abstract: Configurations (positions and orientations, also called conformations in biochemistry) of multibody systems are of great practical and theoretical interests, with important scientific and engineering applications in diverse fields such as computational structural biology, computer simulation, and robotics. In practice, it is very challenging to effectively compute valid system configurations and motions, since multibody systems generally have many degrees of freedom and complicated constraints such as no collision for physical objects and low energy for protein conformations. An important, but largely overlooked, issue is system parametrization: a given constraint can have very different formulations in terms of different parameters, which may affect the solvability of the constraint, the structure of the system configuration space, and the complexity of configuration and motion generation problems.

In this talk, we will present our newly developed simplex-based parameters and algorithms that have achieved orders of magnitude improvement over existing work.  We will also briefly describe graph based algorithms that were originally developed in the robotics community but have been successfully adapted for the computational study of many configurational problems, such as protein and RNA folding, ligand binding, and simulation of animal group behaviors.

Date and Time: Wednesday, 11:00 am – Noon.
Location: Sackler Sciences Center, Room S-120 – Johnson Auditorium

NanoWorcester Symposium

Symposium Program:

Saturday, February 12, 2011

_______________________________________________________

8:00 am – 9:00 am: Registration and Continental Breakfast

8:30 am-9:00 am: Business Meeting

9:00 am – 9:15 am: Opening remarks

Michael J. Malloy, PharmD, Dean, School of Pharmacy Worcester/Manchester, Masshachusetts Colleges of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Worcester, MA.

MORNING SESSION:

9:15 am – 9:40 am

Davis Baird, Ph.D., Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Clark University, Worcester, MA.

From Laboratory to Society: Developing an Informed Approach to Nanoscale Science and Technology

9:40 am – 10:05 am

Nancy Burnham, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Physics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA.

Atomic Force Microscopy, the Eye and Hand of Nanotechnology

10:05 am – 10:20 am: Coffee Break (15 minutes)

10:20 am- 10:45 am

Robert Campbell, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Worcester, MA.

Exploiting Tumor Features for Therapeutic Gain using Cationic Nanotherapeutics

10:45 am – 11:10 am

T. J. (Lakis) Mountziaris, Ph.D., Professor & Department Head, Chemical Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA.

Direct Sensing of Biomolecular Interactions using ZnSe Quantum Dots.

11:10 – 11:20 am: Coffee Break (10 minutes)

Keynote Address: 11:20 am -12:00 pm

Keynote Speaker: Kevin O’ Sullivan, President & Chief Executive Officer, Massachusetts Biomedical Initiative, Worcester, MA.

Moving Nanotechnology from the Bench to the Marketplace

12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: Lunch

AFTERNOON SESSION:

1:00 pm – 1:25 pm

Sergio Granados-Focil, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, Clark University, Worcester, MA.

Ionic transport through polymeric matrices

1:25 pm – 1:50 pm

Terri Camesano, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA.

Probing Bacterial Adhesion at the Nanoscale

2:00 pm – 3:00 pm: Poster Session

3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Wine and Cheese reception

3:30 pm – 4:00 pm: Tour of the labs of Pharmaceutical Sciences

The event will be taking place on Feb 12, at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Worcester, MA. We invite interested people to consider presenting a poster on their research during this event. A link to our website (NanoWorcester) exists at the Colleges of Worcester Consortium at:

http://www.cowc.org/faculty-staff-resources

and a direct link to the program at:

http://sites.google.com/site/nanoworcester/events/first-annual-nanoworcester-symposium

For more information, please feel free to contact any of the members of the symposium advisory committee:

Terri Anne Camesano, Ph.D., WPI, Email: terric@wpi.edu

Robert Campbell, Ph.D., MCPHS, Email: robert.campbell@mcphs.edu

Eihab Jaber, Ph.D., Worcester State University, Email: ejaber@worcester.edu

Arshad Kudrolli, Ph.D., Clark University, Email: akudrolli@clarku.edu

Reema Zeineldin, Ph.D., MCPHS, Email: reema.zeineldin@mcphs.edu