Going East or Going West?
Winning the Best Poster award at the EMRS Spring Meeting held in Strasbourg on 31 May to 1 June 2007 has enabled SONS Scientists Fikri Alemdaroglu and Maurizio Righini to travel far from their working countries to present the results of their hard work achieved through their involvement in the European Science Foundation (ESF) SONS Programme.
An independent jury, formed by members of the SONS Review Panel, choose participants Alemdaroglu and Righini, from a field of 40 other posters. The Review Panel was pleased with the number of poster submissions and the quality of these, which demonstrated the great results generated by the SONS Programme in these past years.
Fikri Alemdaroglu, a PhD student working on ‘DNA Block Copolymers’ in the lab of Prof. Klaus Mullen and Prof. Andreas Hermann at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany used the money from his award to travel West to Boston, USA to attend the 234th American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting held on 19 to 23 August 2007. More than 14000 scientists attended the event which featured world-renowed scientists and leaders covering a range of topics on interdisciplinary material innovations and technologies.
Alemdaroglu's research focuses on creating a new class of amphiphilic hybrids, where block-copolymers are connected with DNA. This new class of compounds could lead to new applications, such as targeting antisense oligonucleotides or chemotherapeutic drug to patients. The fruits of this research can already be seen in the high number of papers published by this up and coming young scientist.
At the Boston meeting, Alemdaroglu's talk on ‘ Functional Nanoparticles from DNA block copolymers’ , presented during the ‘New concepts in Polymeric Materials’ session was well received by the audience. ‘I was pleased with the good feedback and the encouraging comments and questions’, said Alemdaroglu. In addition, his poster ‘ DNA block copolymer micelles: synthesis, morphologies and interactions with living systems’ was selected for the Sci-Mix, within the POLY session, where the best posters from the various divisions are presented. ‘There was a long line of people asking questions!’, he said, and ‘it was quite motivating when people knew about my publications’!. Alemdaroglu also remembers the 40th birthday of ‘Macromolecules’ and the related celebrations during this conference with joy.
While Alemdaroglu travelled far West, Maurizio Righini journeyed to the CLEO Pacific Rim, the Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics, which was held in Seoul, South Corea, on 26 to 31 August 2007. With 783 presentations and 300 posters in total, this conference gave Righini the opportunity to get to know the big names in his area of research. The conference also presented a good mix of academic and industrial world, which allowed Righini to get to know the big players on the market. Righini is currently working at the ICFO (Institute of Photonic Sciences) in Barcelona on ‘Plasmonic Optical Tweezers’ under the supervision of Prof. Romain Quidant. At the Seoul conference, Righini presented a talk on ‘Multiple Trapping in a patterned plasmonic landscape’ where he described a new method of optical manipulation based on gold microsctructures supporting surface plasmons. This new technique ‘enables the arrangement of many micro-spheres over any predefined pattern by using only one single light beam’ said Righini. His talk was well received by the audience. 'I was asked lots of questions on chemical forces and the bandwidth of plasmonic resonance and people were really interested in my work’, said Righini. He went on to say, ' The most important factor about attending this kind of event is the possibility to create a network of contacts with many scientists from many different part of the world, which hopefully will bring stimulating and productive collaborations one day’.
Link to Maurizio’s work http://www.ist-mona.org/news/20070523.asp
Link to Fikri's work http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemScience/Volume/2007/04/DNA_block_copolymers.asp
Fikri Alemdaroglu in front of the Boston Convention Center where the 234th ACS meeting was held.
DNA-block copolymer micelles employed as scaffolds for organic reaction (F. Alemdaroglu et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 4206), engineering nanostructures (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2007, 46, 1172) or targeted drug delivery (Adv. Mater., 2007, in press)
The morphologies and nanomechanical properties of DNA block copolymers were investigated by SFM (F. Alemdaroglu et al., Org. Biomol. Chem., 2007, 5, 1311, and NanoLett., in press)
3D view of an optical binding energy trap computed for a 200 nm polystyrene bead near a 0.45-μm-side square gold (M. Righini et al., Nature Physics, 2007,3, 477 - 480)
Arrangement of polystyrene micro-beads at a homogeneous gold/water interface after laser illumination at the SP resonance (M. Righini et al, Nature Physics, 2007,3, 477 - 480)
