Colloids :: our goals

Outreach and Transfer of Research Finding to Industry

Our Outreach Program has included numerous lectures and presentations by the PI, co-PIs, post-doctoral researchers and students. Our research results were published in several papers in refereed journals.

The educational impact has included research training of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and development of a new course to introduce novel scientific concepts to graduate and undergraduate students.

Our effort has been interdisciplinary, and we have collaborated with industrial partners from many fields of technology, such as catalysts with OMG Inc., electronic materials with Nanodynamics, Ferro, Phoenix Electronic Displays, coatings and fluorescent particles for medical diagnostics with Beckman Coulter, nanosize drugs with elan technologies, nanolithography with Lincolm MIT Lab., and slurries for chemical mechanical polishing with Ferro, IBM, and Intel.

Within a transfer-to-industry agreement with Nanodynamics Inc., a startup company in Buffalo, NY, we are supplying various materials developed under the present NSF grant to be tested for several novel applications such as printable electronics and sensors, optics, and catalysis. As a result of this collaboration, Nanodynamics has recently introduced silver nanoplatelets developed in our laboratory to the electronics industry; this success has been reported in several technical trade journals (i.e., The American Ceramic Society Bulletin, June 2006).

We have established a partnership with a group within the US Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (Aberdeen, Maryland), and obtain a US Army grant, with the objective to synthesize highly anisotropic conductive metallic particles and carry out their testing as obscurant smokes in defense related applications.