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Abstract: Fossil fuels have been overwhelmingly used in many industry sectors in past decades, suffering from significant CO₂ and other pollutant emissions, low efficiency, and nonsustainability. Clean and efficient energy storage and conversion via electrochemical reactions associated with hydrogen, oxygen, and water have attracted substantial attention for energy and environmental sustainability. Among compelling energy technologies, hydrogen proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are a promising zero-emission power source for transportation to mitigate environmental pollution and reduce fossil-fuel dependence. Meanwhile, water electrolyzers have been clearly identified as the sustainable pathway to produce cheap green hydrogen efficiently using renewable electricity. However, current materials, including catalysts, membranes, and ionomers, cannot meet the challenging targets of high-efficiency, low-cost, and long-term durability of hydrogen fuel cells and water electrolyzers. Developing high-performance catalysts from earth-abundant elements to replace current precious metals is crucial for making these hydrogen technologies viable for large-scale clean energy applications. U.S. DOE has been continuously supporting his research group at SUNY-Buffalo in the past decade, aiming to address materials issues by designing and scaling up innovative and highly efficient catalysts and electrodes. This talk discusses recent understanding, progress, achievement, and perspective on developing low-cost and high-performance catalysts based on newly emerging atomically dispersed metal-nitrogen-carbon materials for sustainable and clean hydrogen technologies.

Gang Wu is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo (UB), The State University of New York (SUNY-Buffalo). He completed his Ph.D. studies at the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2004, followed by extensive postdoctoral training at Tsinghua University (2004-2006), the University of South Carolina (2006-2008), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (2008-2010). Then, he was promoted to a staff scientist at LANL. He joined SUNY-Buffalo as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2014 and was quickly promoted to a tenured associate professor in 2018 and a full professor in 2020. His research focuses on functional materials and catalysts for electrochemical energy technologies. He has published more than 320 papers in prestigious journals, including Science, Nature Energy, Nature Catalysis, JACS, Angew Chem, and Advanced Materials. His papers have been cited more than > 48,000 times with an H-index of 118 (Google Scholar) by November 2023. He is currently leading and participating in multiple fuel cell, battery, and renewable fuel (e.g., NH₃) related projects with a total research funding of more than $10.0 M. Dr. Wu was continuously acknowledged by Clarivate Analytics as one of the Highly Cited Researchers since 2018. He recently received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship & Creative Activities (2021) and UB’s Exceptional Scholar–Sustained Achievement Award (2020). He serves as Associate Editor for a few journals, including the Journal of the Electrochemical Society (JES), the Electrochemical Society’s flagship journal.

Event Info: We will discuss what our program structure, what we do, and how the state program compliments and supports federal CERCLA mandates. We intend on highlighting examples of current site-work and how chemistry is integral to the field of environmental protection, as well as playing a part in protective and sustainable community redevelopment.

Bio: Sheri is a Registered Professional Geologist with over 24 years of experience in the environmental field, specifically in contaminated site characterization & remediation, regulation development, and beneficial reuse. After a brief stint performing geotechnical work in private consulting Sheri started with KDEP in 2000 as a Geologist with the tanks program, becoming a supervisor in the Superfund Branch in 2007.  Between 2007 and 2012, Sheri supervised the State Superfund Section, then the Federal Superfund Section before accepting the branch Environmental Scientist Consultant position.  As an E.S. Consultant, she focuses on scientific research, and regulation & policy development for Kentucky’s Superfund, Brownfields, and other programs.  In addition, Sheri serves as the technical lead for Kentucky's high priority clean-up sites. Outside of her career with the commonwealth of Kentucky, Sheri is on the Board of Advisors to the Kentucky Geological Survey and a long-time active member of the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, hiking, cycling, reading, fiber arts, and creating stained glass. 

ABSTRACT

Ambient ionization mass spectrometry (AIMS) is an evolving soft ionization technique that directly snapshots biomolecular profiles, spatial distributions, and chemical changes from biological tissue or fluids with minimal pretreatment. I will first introduce the methodology development of two representative AIMS techniques, namely air-flow-assisted desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry imaging (AFADESI-MSI) and conductive polymer spray ionization (CPSI), along with their applications in preclinical anti-tumor drug research and clinical cancer diagnosis. The topic will be then shifted to using AIMS to create water microdroplets, which exhibit ultrafast kinetic and favorable thermodynamic microenvironment differing from equal volume of bulk solution phase. I will introduce my research on AIMS-based microdroplet chemistry for both bioanalysis and synthesis of basic building blocks of life materials.

Abstract

The accurate identification and detailed analysis of biomolecules have led to a deeper understanding of biological intricacies, paving the way for innovative therapeutic strategies. The cutting-edge field of single-molecule techniques has emerged as a highly promising avenue in this pursuit of revealing the identity and real-time dynamics of biomolecular structure and interactions. In this seminar, I will discuss the development of single-molecule bioanalytical approaches, from unraveling the stability and dynamics of folded nucleic acid structures to proteomics applications. By employing DNA nanotechnology techniques to create a confined space for a G-quadruplex (GQ) structure and performing single-molecule mechanical unfolding assay of GQ using optical tweezers, we revealed that confined space facilitates the folding of the G-quadruplex  structure by enhancing both stability and kinetics. Venturing into single-molecule proteomics, we introduced the mechanically reconfigurable DNA Nanoswitch Calipers (DNC) capable of measuring multiple coordinates on single biomolecules with angstrom-level precision. By measuring the distances of specific amino acid residues in optical and multiplexed magnetic tweezers, our work extends to the single molecule fingerprinting of peptides, showcasing discrimination within a heterogeneous population and even between distinct post-translational modifications. Furthermore, by using force-activated barcodes in measuring the distances of biotin-binding sites in single native-folded biotin-streptavidin complexes, we demonstrated the DNC’s potential in single-molecule structural proteomics applications.

Abstract: The vast majority of chemistry and biology occurs in solution, and new label-free analytical techniques that can help resolve solution-phase complexity at the single-molecule level can provide new microscopic perspectives of unprecedented detail. Here, we use the increased light-molecule interactions in high-finesse fiber Fabry-Pérot microcavities to detect individual biomolecules as small as 1.2 kDa (10 amino acids) with signal-to-noise ratios >100, even as the molecules are freely diffusing in solution.  Our method delivers 2D intensity and temporal profiles, enabling the distinction of sub-populations in mixed samples. Strikingly, we observe a linear relationship between passage time and molecular radius, unlocking the potential to gather crucial information about diffusion and solution-phase conformation. Furthermore, mixtures of biomolecule isomers of the same molecular weight can also be resolved. Detection is based on a novel molecular velocity filtering and dynamic thermal priming mechanism leveraging both photo-thermal bistability and Pound-Drever-Hall cavity locking. This technology holds broad potential for applications in life and chemical sciences and represents a major advancement in label-free in vitro single-molecule techniques.

Methanogens are a diverse group of archaea with ancient evolutionary origins. They are found in a wide range of anoxic environments where they carry out a form of anaerobic respiration known as methanogenesis. This process reduces simple oxidized carbon compounds to generate methane as an end product. Another group of archaea related to methanogens carry out the anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) and are known as anaerobic methanotrophs (ANME).  Methanogens and ANME are both key components in the global carbon cycle and play a central role in controlling atmospheric methane concentrations. Consistent with their anaerobic lifestyles and ancient evolutionary origins, methanogens and ANME contain an abundance of Fe-S cluster proteins. Radical S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) enzymes are [4Fe-4S]-cluster containing enzymes that catalyze a wide variety of difficult biochemical reactions through the generation of a highly reactive 5’-deoxyadenosyl radical. Here, we discuss our recent progress towards uncovering the functions of novel radical SAM enzymes in methanogens and ANME. We identified the missing glutamate 2,3-aminomutase important for salt tolerance in marine organisms as well as characterized the first archaeal methylthiotransferase involved in tRNA modification. 

The structure of plant cell wall carbohydrates creates the strength and flexibility of the plant cell wall, which shapes plants’ overall agronomic fitness in the field. Differences in cell wall carbohydrates and associated compounds are also influential post-harvest, since carbohydrate structural characteristics can influence a material’s food processing characteristics, feed value for livestock, and biofuel production potential.

The core areas of Dr. Schendel’s research program at the ����vlog�ٷ���� are plant cell wall characterization (especially detailed structural analysis of cell wall carbohydrates) and analysis and application of phenolics and other secondary plant metabolites. Strategic collaborations have allowed us to explore applied questions such as ruminant microbe fermentation of cell wall carbohydrates. This seminar will share results from several projects, including our in-depth characterizations of the cell walls of cool-season forages and hempseeds and exploration of their seasonal and species/cultivar variation. 

Abstract: Our research group focuses on building tools that enable inverse materials design and give new insights into the fundamental chemical physics of liquids, interfaces, and materials. For this talk, we will discuss our progress in two of our primary research thrusts.

The first part of the talk will focus on our work in developing methods that are used to accelerate the design of functional materials, including radical-based polymers and organic optoelectronic materials. The radical-based polymers have the potential to serve as energy storage materials. Successful materials design requires careful molecular engineering of the polymer and electrolyte. To solve the molecular-scale part of the problem, we develop physically motivated machine learning models that predict molecular properties (e.g., hole reorganization energies) from low-cost representations, and pair these with reinforcement learning methods for inverse design applications. In our first demonstration of the reinforcement learning scheme, we show that this framework is capable of integrating with quantum chemistry calculations in real-time, and through a careful design of the curriculum, we are able to find a diverse set of molecules with desired singlet and triplet energy levels.

The second part will focus on our efforts on developing representations for predicting the polymer physics of intrinsically disordered proteins at a much lower computational cost that current coarse-grained methods. One advantage of our new representation is that it avoids specifying the longest length of the chain in advance. In addition, this representation works well with a set of highly charged amino acid sequences, uncovering new insights to the fundamental interactions and scaling behavior of these systems.

Bio: Daniel Tabor received his B.S. in ����vlog�ٷ���� from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011, where he was advised by John F. Stanton. He then attended the University of Wisconsin—Madison for his Ph.D. (2016), where he was a member of Ned Sibert’s group. From 2016-2019, he was a postdoc with Alán Aspuru-Guzik at Harvard University. Daniel began his independent career on the faculty at Texas A&M in the Fall of 2019, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of ����vlog�ٷ����. He was named a Texas A&M Institute of Data Science Career Initiation Fellow in 2021 and a Cottrell Scholar in 2023.

Conjugated polymers have been the cornerstone of organic electronics, with applications in such diverse areas as photovoltaics, field effect transistors, batteries, and bioelectronics. However, a number of challenges are still apparent, including, scalability, sustainability, and applicability under a broad range of real-world conditions. Our efforts have focused on novel, simplified polymer architectures, scalable synthetic methods and applications in solar cells and batteries. In this talk, a primary focus will be on the design of novel semiconducting polymers for intrinsically stretchable solar cells (IS-PSCs). We have designed novel side-chain functionalized conjugated polymers bearing hydrogen-bonding groups, such as thymine. Such units capable of inducing strong intermolecular hydrogen-bonding leading to polymer assembly and highly efficient and mechanically robust PSCs. Importantly, such polymers have enabled IS-PSCs showing an unprecedented combination of PCE (13.7%) and ultrahigh mechanical durability (maintaining 80% of initial PCE after 43% strain). Additionally, efforts toward the development of novel non-conjugated electroactive polymers will be introduced where we focus on elucidating structure-function relationships and synthetic pathways for this promising materials class.

Folding of proteins into their active 3D-structure occurs spontaneously or is assisted with the help of chaperones within a biologically reasonable time, from micro- to milliseconds. It occurs within different compartments of the cell, controlled by the chemical environment. When folding goes wrong in cells, misfolded and/or aggregated proteins may arise, unable to perform their specific biological function. The correlation between structural motifs and their 3D-structure has been established to influence biology. However, less is known about the biological implications of protein topology, i.e., motifs that can act as a structural switch in response to environmental changes. Leptin is the founding member of the Pierced Lasso Topology (PLT), a newly discovered protein family sharing the unique features of a “knot-like” topology.  A PLT is formed when the protein backbone pierces through a covalent loop formed by a single disulfide bond. PLTs are found in all kingdoms of life, with 14-different biological functions, found in different cell compartments. Despite the large number found in nature, where more than 600 proteins have been found with a PLT, a connection between topology and biological function has not yet been determined. We investigate three biological systems, the hormone leptin, chemokines, and the oxidoreductase superoxide dismutase (SOD1) and the association between the threaded topology and the biological function. Our results show that a PLT may control conformational dynamics switching biological activity on/off depending on the chemical environment. Thus, we propose that PLTs may act as a molecular switch to control biological activity in vivo.