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Lifechips Seminar Series
Achievement/Results
NSF Funded IGERT-Lifechips program at the University of California, Irvine continues to organize the monthly seminars hosted by the Lifechips students. The goal of planning the seminar series is to teach the students how to successfully host seminars. We ask them to invite the speakers who can be professors, researchers, faculty members from other campuses, or established industry researchers. We encourage them to keep in min of the Lifechips theme of multi-inter-disciplinary research as they search for their speakers. Students then continue to learn how to create flyers, maximize the advertising methods, and hosting the seminar presentations. For 2009-2010 seminar series, Lifechips program has extended their methods of advertising for the seminars to have even better turnouts by asking the Engineering Dean’s office and other departments/schools to send mass email announcements to the general public.
The results have been phenomenonal where the seminar room has been filled with a vast audience consisting of people coming from many different backgrounds. This seminar series is an ongoing process and for this report period, there have been five speakers. First, Lifechips student David Bardin hosted his seminar with Professor Dino Di Carlo as the speaker. Professor Di Carlo is from the department of Bioengineering, California Nanosystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. His talk was about Inertial Microfluidics – Continuous Cell and Particle Manipulation at the Microscale. Overall, his presentation demonstrated: 1) several unique phenomena that allow for sorting, focusing, and ordering of cells and particles in three dimensions under continuous flow with a single fluid input, 2) inertial migration theory and recent results investigating effects of particle size and deformability on migration behavior and the possibility of measuring and sorting based on these parameters, 3) results on using inertial focusing to create an extreme throughput flow cytometer for blood analysis.
Second, Lifechips student Meghan Cozzens invited Professor Marc Madou as the seminar speaker. Professor Madou is the Chancellor’s Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. His talk was about Fluidics on Compact disc for Molecular Diagnostics and Carbon-MEMS Fractal-Like Electrodes for Energy Conversion Devices. Overall, his presentation was about: 1) the research, design, and development of centrifugal, microfluidic platforms for nucleic acid analysis and diagnostics, 2) introduction of fractals as an optimal geometry for minimizing the work lost due to the transfer network while maximizing effective surface area, 3) the fabrication methods to achieve the integration of top-down fabricated carbon microstructures with bottom-up grown carbon nano particles.
Third, Lifechips student Amber Greer invited Professor Maria Feng as the speaker. Professor Feng is from the department of Civil/Environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Her presentation’s title was "Intelligent Renewal of Crumbling Infrastructure, and she covered the following discussions: 1) timely detection of problems using innovative sensors, 2) reliable assessment of triage opportunities through the development of effective diagnostic and prognostic techniques, and 3) economical solutions for such problems through the use of advanced materials and technologies. Her presentation also previews a new research project on trenchless rehabilitation of underground water pipes using robotic applications of carbon fiber composites. These studies will form the foundation for a fundamental change in infrastructure maintenance and design.
Fourth, Lifechips student Nora Jameson invited Professor James Nowick as the speaker. Professor Nowick is from the department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His talk title was Mimicry of Protein Structures and Interactions with Unnatural Amino Acids. Overall, his talk described the design, synthesis, and study of peptides that contain unnatural amino acids and mimic the structures and interactions of proteins. The first class of peptides, artificial Beta sheets, is designed to mimic the structures and interactions of Beta sheets and the second class of peptides is designed to form water-soluble nanometer-scale structures that may ultimately be used to interact with the nanometer-scale machinery of living cells.
Fifth, Lifechips student Sara Saedinia hosted her seminar with Professor Steven George as the speaker. Professor George is from the department of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology at the University of California, Irvine. His talk title was Vascularizing Engineered Tissues. Overall, his presentation described the approach for creating vascularized engineered tissue comprised of mature interconnected microvessel networks with supporting pericytes, including early results on in vitro microfluidic platforms as well as in vivo performance.
This seminar series plays an important role in the Lifechips program as it creates opportunities for not only Lifechips students to meet each other but others in the science community as well. At the end of each seminar, many questions were raised and discussions took place, which helped to enrich the event even more.
Address Goals
The Lifechips seminar series addresses the discovery as primary goal and learning as secondary goal because it offers students the opportunities to see current or established research projects from outstanding research scientists from so many different backgrounds. The seminar speakers often talk about their collaboration with other scientists in different fields and that has helped to speed their research process and produce satisfactory data. Also, most speakers discuss about future works and ideas to expand their projects and are willing to meet with anyone for a discussion on new proposals. This is a great opportunity for students to express their opinions, ideas, and bring their creativity to a particular research project that caught their interests.
