EVENT DETAILS
ChBE's third seminar of the Fall Quarter will be presented by two of our grad students, detailed information is given below:
Speaker: Joao Moreira, PhD candidate, Amaral LabTitle: How do we quantify the scientific impact of researchers or academic departments? AbstractHow to quantify the impact of a researcher's or an institution's body of work is a matter of increasing importance to scientists, funding agencies, and hiring committees. The use of bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index or the Journal Impact Factor, have become widespread despite their known limitations. We argue that most existing bibliometric indicators are inconsistent, biased, and, worst of all, susceptible to manipulation. We present a principled approach to the development of an indicator to quantify the scientific impact of both individual researchers and research institutions grounded on the functional form of the distribution of the asymptotic number of citations. We validate our approach using the publication records of 1,283 researchers from seven scientific and engineering disciplines and the chemistry departments at the 106 U.S. research institutions classified as "very high research activity". Our approach has three distinct advantages. First, it accurately captures the overall scientific impact of researchers at all career stages, as measured by asymptotic citation counts. Second, unlike other measures, our indicator is resistant to manipulation and rewards publication quality over quantity. Third, our approach captures the time-evolution of the scientific impact of research institutions.
Speaker: DelRae Haag, PhD candidate, Kung LabTitle: Investigation of a Graphene Oxide Coating on Nano-Gold Catalysis
AbstractGold nanoparticles (GNs) have shown tremendous catalytic activity for a variety of reactions such as, alcohol oxidation, reduction of aromatic nitro-compounds, CO oxidation, and the water gas shift (WGS) reaction. Much is known about the catalytic properties of GNs: the reaction rate and selectivity are highly dependent on the size and the nature of crystallographic orientation of the support. However, experiments are just beginning to understand the effect of other environment factors on catalytic activity.Graphene and graphene oxide (GO), a highly oxidized form of graphene, are materials with incredibly interesting chemical and mechanical properties. These materials can have high surface areas and electrical properties can be tuned by reducing the amount of oxygenates on the surface. We have begun to explore how graphene oxide can be used to modify properties of gold nanoparticles. We hypothesize that the catalytic activity of gold nanoparticles on a metal oxide support can be modified by a graphene oxide over-coat. The graphene oxide coating could help reduce metal leaching during reaction, control the monodisperisity of the nanoparticles, or influence catalytic properties through electron donation/withdrawal and cooperative effects. Sub-10 nm gold particles are deposited on nonporous silica and treated with ozone to gently remove organic moieties. The silica is then wrapped with GO or reduced-GO via electrostatic or covalent interactions effectively capping the gold and silica. The catalytic activity for these gold nanoparticles versus non coated particles was tested for a variety of reactions including the catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol.
Date & Time: Thursday, October 15th 9:00 am - 10:00 amLocation: Tech LR4 (refreshments will be available at 8:45am)
TIME Thursday October 15, 2015 at 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
LOCATION LR4 Technological Institute map it
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CONTACT Iman Nasser iman.nasser@northwestern.edu
CALENDAR McCormick-Chemical and Biological Engineering