Achievement

Kevin Freedman and Rafael Mulero, along with their advisor Dr. MinJun Kim, and other colleagues, received the Best Paper Award for their paper, "High throughput Nanofluidic Architectures for Nanoparticle Separation," at the 2009 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Symposium in June 2009. The team showed how a ceramic membrane (silicon nitride in this case) with a nanopore (~180nm in diameter) can be used to efficiently separate nanoparticles from a mixture. The main theme of their paper was their ability to manipulate the selectivity of the membrane by changing its surface charge density, a fact they realized from mathematically simulating their setup. By chemically functionalizing the nanopores, the team showed that they could separate 20nm polystyrene beads from 50nm ones. This team was also invited to write a review of "Nanopore Based Devices for Bioanalytical Applications" for the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation.