Faculty News

Juan de Pablo, Daniel Klingenberg and Michael Graham recently received a grant of $916,000 from the National Science Foundation for research on nanoscale modeling of flow in microfluidic devices. Microfluidic devices, which rely on the ability to control the flow and transport of fluids and macromolecules through micron- and nanometer-scale geometries, are increasingly finding applications in biology, chemistry, medicine, and other areas. The goal of the research is to develop fundamental modeling methods that will allow subsequent development of a general nanoscale process simulator, akin to those currently in use for design of large-scale industrial processes.

Juan de Pablo was the keynote speaker at the CUChE-3 meeting in China in September. In October, he presented the invited Wohl Memorial Lecture at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware.

A recent publication by Manos Mavrikakis, et al. (his first showing his UW-Madison address) was selected as "Hot Paper of the Week" by ChemWeb.com in their Member News Bulletin. The paper, which appeared in Catalysis Letters 2000, 64:2-4: 101-106, presented self-consistent density functional calculations for the adsorption of O and CO on flat and stepped Au(111) surfaces that were used to investigate effects that may increase the reactivity of gold.

In April, Harmon Ray was an invited speaker at Rutgers Collaboratus X, the tenth annual Merck-sponsored distinguished lectures in chemical and biochemical engineering. Harmon spoke on "Some Issues in Understanding Polymerization Processes."

In September, John Yin co-organized "Engineering Challenges and Opportunities in the Genomic Era," the National Academy of Engineering's Sixth Annual Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering held in Irvine, California. John also presented invited lectures in September for the Program in Theoretical Biology at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and at MIT's Bioengineering and Environmental Health Sciences Program.

In June, James Rawlings gave a series five of invited lectures at the Department of Automatic Control, Lund Institute of Technology, in Lund, Sweden.