From Colloidal Systems to Frustrated Magnets: 7th Gotham-Metro Condensed Matter Meeting 2012

Keynote Speakers

Leon Balents, PhD

University of California, Santa Barbara
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Leon Balents is a theoretical physicist working broadly in the area of correlated electron systems, quantum magnetism, and complex materials. He received his PhD in 1994 from Harvard University, and is now a permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been on the faculty since 1999. He is known for contributions to a breadth of subjects in condensed matter physics. This includes correlation effects in carbon nanotubes and other one dimensional systems, exotic quantum critical phenomena, and spin liquids in frustrated magnets. With Joel Moore, he predicted the three dimensional topological insulator. Balents is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, the AP Sloan Fellowship, the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, and several visiting chairs. He is the author of more than 120 refereed journal publications, and has an h-index of 40 (Web of Science).

Mohammad F. Islam, PhD

Carnegie Mellon University
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Mohammad F. Islam is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. He received his PhD in Physics from Lehigh University in 2000 focusing on aggregation and adsorption behavior of polyelectrolytes. He then moved to the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. There he worked on colloidal systems and carbon nanotubes. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 2005, and since then, he has received several awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2007), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), a Kavli Fellowship (2008), and a George Tallman Ladd Research Award (2009).

His current research interests are to investigate experimentally the microscopic structure and dynamics of synthetic and biological soft matter to better understand traditional concepts such as phase transitions, self-assembly, and the relationship between microscopic structure and macroscopic properties. He also applies his expertise in soft matter to challenges in nanoscience to answer fundamental scientific questions. Further, he employs both soft- and nanomaterials-approaches to engineer multifunctional materials with tailored optical, electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. These unique materials have diverse applications in areas such as photonics, fuel cells, supercapacitors, drug delivery vessels, scaffolds for tissue engineering, etc.

Speakers

Milan Begliarbekov

Stevens Institute of Technology
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Yang Bo

Princeton University
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Matthew Gratale

University of Pennsylvania
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Matthew Gratale graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008, where he received a BS in Physics and completed his senior thesis with Tony Dinsmore. He is currently a Physics PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania working in Arjun Yodh's soft condensed matter lab.

Harish Krishnamoorthy

Queens College
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Harish Krishnamoorthy received his MS in Photonics from the Cochin University of Science and Technology, India in 2007. Subsequently, he joined Vinod Menon's Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics at Queens College and Graduate Center of CUNY for his PhD. His current research interests include studying quantum optics using plasmonic and metamaterial systems.

Vivek Kumar

College of Staten Island
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Vivek Kumar is a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the City University of New York, where he studies carbon nanofilms for chemical sensing. He will be defending his dissertation this May. He holds a masters degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and an undergraduate degree form the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His previous research experience includes master's work on template synthesis of carbon from block copolymers and undergraduate thesis research on computational modeling of novel carbon-based hydrogen storage systems. As an intern at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, he processed raw cosmic ray data in a field study. A motivated researcher, he is also passionate about science outreach and has co founded Knowdium—a non-profit organization for science education through distance learning.

Chuck-Hou Yee

Rutgers University
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Chuck-Hou Yee's research focuses on strongly-correlated physics in transition-metal oxides. He is particularly interested in metal-insulator transitions and superconductivity, as well as in advancing the algorithms used to model the materials exhibiting these phenomena. He received his BS in Physics from Caltech, and is pursuing his PhD at Rutgers University under the direction of Kristjan Haule.

Panelists

Don Monroe, PhD

Freelance Science & Technology Writer
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Don Monroe got BS and PhD degrees in physics from MIT in 1980 and 1985, respectively, and then became a member of staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. At Bell Labs and its successors he did research on impurity band conduction, superconductivity, optical fibers, silicon-germanium heterostructures, integrated-circuit power reduction, novel transistor structures, integrated optoelectronic devices, and gate-oxide reliability. In 2002, he sat on the five-person committee that investigated, and ultimately confirmed, the alleged scientific misconduct by Bell Labs physicist Hendrik Schön. In 2003, he entered New York University's program on science journalism, and since 2005 he has been a freelance science and technology writer and editor, with publications in Scientific American, Science, New Scientist, The Scientist, Technology Review, Physics, CACM, and others, as well as dozens of eBriefings for the New York Academy of Sciences.

Lydia Sohn, PhD

University of California, Berkeley
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Lydia Sohn received her AB degree in Chemistry and Physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard–Radcliffe Colleges in 1988. She then received her AM in Physics in 1990 and PhD in Physics in 1992 from Harvard University. Following her graduate studies, Sohn held a one-year NSF/NATO postdoctoral appointment in Applied Physics at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. From 1993 – 1995 she was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Semiconductor Physics Research Department, where she developed new methods of lithography with an atomic force microscope. Sohn joined the faculty at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor of Physics in 1995. Since 2003 Sohn has been part of the faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at UC Berkeley, where she currently is an Associate Professor. Her research centers on developing and employing quantitative techniques, advanced microscopy (e.g. 3D super-resolution imaging), and micro/nanofabrication technologies to access biological phenomena at the single cell level. Sohn has been the recipient of numerous awards including the National Science Foundation Faculty CAREER award, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, and the DuPont Young Professor Award. Sohn is currently the Chair of UC Berkeley's Institutional Biosafety Committee and a member of its Research Compliance Advisory Committee. Furthermore, she is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for QB3's Core laboratory: the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center. She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Boulder School for Condensed Matter & Materials Physics.