Katherine A. Mirica, Ph.D
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rapid Prototyping of Carbon-Based Gas Sensors on Paper and Plastic
Portable chemical sensors are a critical part of managing and protecting the environment, human health, safety, and quality of life. Chemically functionalized carbon nanomaterials are promising materials for chemical sensing, but their poor solubility of carbon nanomaterials hinders their chemical functionalization and the subsequent integration of these materials into devices. This presentation will describe an innovation that overcomes this challenge using a solvent-free procedure for rapid prototyping and fabrication of selective chemical sensors from carbon nanomaterials on the surface of paper and plastic. This procedure is completely analogous in simplicity to drawing with a pencil, and enables fabrication of functional chemical sensors on the surface of paper or plastic from commercially available starting materials in less than 15 min. The simplicity of this fabrication method enabled us to further develop wireless chemical sensing devices that can be interrogated with a smartphone. Taken together, these developments may enable smartphone-based widely distributed wireless chemical sensors with unprecedented utility in environmental monitoring, diagnosis of disease, and protection of public safety.
Shalise Couvertier
Boston College
Piperidine-based Probes to Target Reactive Cysteines.
Cysteine residues on proteins have important catalytic and regulatory roles in complex proteomes. Chemical probes and mass spectrometry-based proteomics can be used to investigate proteins that possess these reactive cysteines, to better understand their reactivity and role in disease. Development of a probe library that is specifically tuned for reactive cysteines is essential. Using a piperidine scaffold, we are able to incorporate a cysteine-specific electrophile, alkyne reporter group and directing groups to develop a library of probes that can be used for Activity Based Protein Profiling (ABPP). We have employed these techniques to identify proteins such as Cathepsin D, Protein Kinase B and Protein disulfide isomerase (PDIA1) and have begun to study their roles in cancer.
Katherine Phillips
Harvard University
Sol-Gel Chemistry of Inverse Opals
Nanomaterials are of great scientific and technological interest due to unique phenomena that can occur at this length-scale; however, there are currently only a limited number of obtainable materials using simple, bottom-up methods. One example of a self-assembled nanostructure is the inverse opal, an ordered, porous material formed from the negative space in a colloidal crystal. Due to its high periodicity, it is a three-dimensional photonic crystal, giving it interesting optical properties. Additionally, it has interesting wetting properties due to its high porosity. Here, we investigate how to use sol-gel chemistry to gain molecular control over the material, thus affecting its macroscopic properties.