Event
ChBE Seminar Series: Oded Rabin
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Room 2110, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Chunsheng Wang
cswang@umd.edu
Nanostructured Materials for Biomedical Imaging and Molecular Sensing
Presented by Oded RabinAssistant Professor
Department of Materials Science & Engineering and IREAP
University of Maryland
The unique physical properties of nanoscale materials provide the opportunity to explore new applications of commonplace materials. I will present two examples, nanoparticles as an X-ray imaging contrast agent and nanostructures for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). (1) A contrast agent based on nanoparticles of Bi2S3 was formulated for X-ray imaging of the circulatory system. In-vivo imaging experiments were carried out to compare the performance of the nanoparticle contrast agent to that of a state-of-the-art molecular contrast agent. The nanoparticle-based agent provided high-quality images of the components of the circulatory and lymphatic systems. Biocompatible nanoparticle contrast agents are important for medical research, to develop methods of targeting and drug delivery and to track the effects of therapies in pre-clinical studies. (2) The optical scattering and SERS properties of plasmonic nanostructures vary dramatically with shape. A bottom-up approach is used to fabricate a library of plasmonic nanostructures for the study of the relationship between structure, plasmon resonances and SERS. The method uses the directed self-assembly of uniform silver nanocubes on a substrate into an array of nanocube clusters. The substrates thus obtained are suitable for use in conjugation with automated scanning microscopes, to analyze rapidly a wide range of plasmonic structures.
About the Spearker:
Dr. Rabin graduated from the Technion Haifa, Israel in 1996, and received a M.Sc. degree in Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, Israel in 1998. He worked on his dissertation with Prof. Mildred Dresselhaus at MIT and received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 2004. Dr. Rabin took postdoctoral positions at Harvard Medical School applying nanotechnology materials in medical imaging research and at UC-Berkeley studying thermoelectric properties of materials. He joined UMD in 2007. His research interests include Electrical and Thermal Transport in Low Dimensional Systems, Nanoporous Membranes, Biomedical Contrast Agents, and Interfacial Nanoscience.
