News and Events

IMNI Awards Summer Internships       
June 2009

IMNI offers to support two undergraduate interns over the summer to work on collaborative interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary projects in the molecular and nanosciences.
            

IMNI Summer Scholar Michael Chon ’09 graduated this May from Brown University, and would like to continue his work during the summer as he contemplates Graduate School.

His research project investigates the “Nano and micro-crack arrester patterns on Lithium battery electrodes”.  Michael will work with Professor Kyung-Suk Kim, of the Division of Engineering.  They plan to design and analyze thin film electrode patterns and nano-composites that will enhance durability of Lithium batteries. The research will be focused on crack arresters that will guide nano and micro crack growth to relieve the stress without causing degradation of the charging capacity. In this research durability test experiments will be carried out for various patterned and/or nano-composite thin film electrodes. Then the effectiveness of crack arresters on the durability will be analyzed. The analysis is based AFM studies of stress relieving crack formations in the thin film electrodes, caused by Lithium intercalation.  Click here, to learn more about Michael.

Vivian Ortiz, a Bachelor of Science Candidate in BioChemistry was awarded the IMNI Summer Internship to work with Chemistry Professor Christoph Rose-Petruck, et.al  on “Nanoparticle-Immunolabeling of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC)”  Vivian and others will investigate better, more specific and sensitive cancer detection methods than the standard X-ray, CT scan, or MRI.  The group will explore a new approach for x-ray imaging of very early (~1 mm diameter) tumors that are labeled with gold nanoparticles (AuNP) chemically linked to immunoglobulins (IgG) specific for HCC.   They expect that at the end of the IMNI internship sufficient results are available to attempt in vivo AuNP-IgG labeling of murine livers. The team’s future research will aim to inject AuNP-IgGs into a mouse liver in vivo in order for this biomarker to accumulate at the areas of HCC. The successful completion of these experiments will be an important pre-clinical advance that hopefully will lead to future improved clinical diagnostic methods for HCC. This research is a collaborative project that includes Prof. C. Rose-Petruck and Prof. G. Diebold, Department of Chemistry, Prof. J. Wands and Dr. Z. Derdak, Liver Research Center, Brown Medical School and Rhode Island Hospital.  Click here, to learn more about Vivian.