Anna-Karin Gustavsson

The interdisciplinary work in the Gustavsson research group is focused on the development and application of 3D single-molecule tracking and super-resolution imaging throughout mammalian cells. The Gustavsson research group strives to gain detailed information about cellular nanoscale structure, dynamics, and molecular mechanisms by designing innovative and versatile imaging tools and analysis algorithms. The goal of this research is to improve our understanding of cellular function and pathogenesis to answer biophysical and biomedical questions related to aging and cancer.

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Stephan Link

Building new photonic materials and devices from the bottom up is a central goal in nanoscience. Using plasmonic nanoparticles as building blocks requires a detailed understanding of how the optical properties of the individual nanoparticles change as they are assembled into complex, higher order structures. These changes occur because interactions between plasmonic nanoparticles lead to new phenomena that depend not only on the dimensions and shapes of the individual nanoparticles but also their relative distances and orientations. An additional level of complexity exists when nanoparticles are prepared and assembled by chemical synthesis and soft lithography methods because irregularities or ‘defects’ in particle size, shape, and ordering are inherently present in those systems. Despite these challenges, the advantages of chemically prepared nanoparticles include highly crystalline structures and small interparticle distances, allowing for the strongest plasmon response. Therefore, the advantageous properties of chemically prepared nanoparticles make it worthwhile to understand and control the challenges introduced by polydispersity, especially given the many assembly strategies already developed so far. To fully exploit these nanoparticle assemblies and to advance the field, it is first necessary to determine the effect of imperfections on the functional properties of nanomaterials consisting of many interacting plasmonic nanoparticles. In addition to plasmon coupling between nanoparticles, their interaction with the environment is also a key factor for many applications of plasmonic nanoparticles ranging from catalytic substrates to drug delivery agents. To address these complex issues on a microscopic scale, the Link lab is applying and developing single molecule and particle spectroscopy techniques, which, when correlated with structural characterization of the same nanostructure using electron microscopes and detailed electromagnetic modeling, allow us to address the following important thematic questions:
1) How do the optical properties of nanoparticle assemblies depend on the morphology of the overall structure and what is the role of disorder with respect to nanoparticle size, shape, and positioning?
2) How is the initial plasmon energy dissipated in plasmonic nanostructures and can it initiate chemistry?
3) How do nanoparticles interact with proteins and what is the role of the protein corona on their biological fate?
While these questions address mainly fundamental issues, the long-term research is strongly guided by possible applications of assembled nanomaterials as plasmonic waveguides and antennas, active plasmonic displays, plasmonic photo-catalysts, and drug delivery agents based on the principles learned from understanding coupling between plasmonic nanoparticles and their interactions with the surrounding molecular environment.

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Matteo Pasquali

Matteo Pasquali joined Rice in 2000 and is a Professor in the Dept of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the Dept of Chemistry, and Materials Science and Nanoengineering. During his tenure, he served as Co-Director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory in the Richard E. Smalley Institute. His current research interests include theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of: scalable liquid-phase processing of single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs); behavior of individual SWNTs in water and other liquids; behavior of concentrated liquid phases of SWNTs (networks; lyotropic liquid crystals); behavior of functionalized SWNTs in liquids; scalable production of SWNTs; scalable separation of metallic vs. semiconductor SWNTs; fiber spinning of neat and functionalized SWNTs from solutions; fabrication of transparent, conductive films of SWNTs; applications of SWNTs as fuel cell electrods; applications of SWNTs in biological systems; fluid mechanics of polymer solutions; visualization of flowing DNA molecules; free-surface and interfacial flows; flow, hemolysis, and thrombosis in blood pumps; response of white and red blood cells to strain and stress; stabilized Galerkin/finite element methods for viscoelastic flow; rheology of semi-flexible polymer molecules; DNA condensation; emulsion rheology.

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Kevin Kelly

Dr. Kelly is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chair of the Applied Physics Program at Rice. He received a B.S. in engineering physics from Colorado School of Mines in 1993 and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Rice in 1999. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Materials Research in Sendai, Japan and in the chemistry department at Penn State University.
His lab’s research includes the cutting-edge development and characterization of molecular machines such as the Nanocar and similar molecules, probing novel electronic states in graphene and topological insulators, investigating charge transport in polymer photovoltaics, and designing "single-pixel camera" compressive imaging systems. In addition to being a member of the Smalley-Curl Institute, he has been a member of the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science, and the Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE) Center at Princeton. He co-founded and was Chief Scientist for Inview Technology Corporation, a company focused on commercializing compressive imaging. He was a primary lecturer for the anthropology course “Nanotechnology: Content and Context” for five years, has co-created and taught a course on technological disasters in the Department of History at Rice since 2009, and consulted for the Baker Institute for Public Policy on the development and commercial outlook of photovoltaics.

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Peter Wolynes

The research in my group is broadly concerned with many-body phenomena in biology, chemistry and physics. A major theme is understanding systems where a large diversity of long-lived states is involved, necessitating the use of a statistical characterization of an energy or attractor landscape. The most notable examples are glasses, liquids, biomolecules and biomolecular regulatory networks. In the area of protein folding we are interested both in describing folding kinetics in the laboratory and the development of bioinformatically based schemes for predicting structure from sequence using computer simulation. A key concept is that the energy landscape of a foldable protein looks like a rugged funnel. This idea guides the development of both simple folding kinetics models and structure prediction algorithms. Similar issues of attractor landscapes also arise in higher order biological processes, such as gene recognition and genetic network regulation, which we also study. The energy landscapes of supercooled liquids and glasses also present interesting problems. We have shown how a new approach based on "random first order transitions" explains many quantitative relations found empirically both in liquids and under cryogenic conditions where quantum effects play a role. The same ideas show promise in the study of systems as different as high temperature superconductors, polymer assemblies, and microemulsions. They are also useful for describing the three dimensional structure and dynamics of the interior of living cells.

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Bruce Weisman

Dr. R. Bruce Weisman and his group investigate the spectroscopy and photophysics of fullerenes and carbon nanotubes. All of these are closed nanoscopic structures formed from carbon atoms. Fullerenes, such as C60, C70, and their chemical derivatives, have unusual molecular properties that cause interesting behaviors following the absorption of light. Time-resolved absorption and emission methods are used to study radiationless decay, photochemical reactions, and energy transfer in fullerenes. Another major research topic is single-walled carbon nanotube spectroscopy. Following the discovery in Weisman?s lab of near-infrared nanotube fluorescence, the group has measured and unraveled the absorption and emission spectra of more than 30 semiconducting nanotube species. Follow-up projects include detailed elucidation of nanotube electronic structure, as well as applications in non-invasive biomedical imaging and analytical nanotechnology.

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Peter Rossky

I am a theoretical chemist who finds nothing more engaging then to try to understand the molecular-level processes that underlie an important experimental observation whose origin is controversial or puzzling. My work lies almost entirely within amorphous condensed phase materials (liquids, polymers, molecular clusters). I have two very long-standing themes in my work. The first is in the role of liquids as an environment for chemistry, with a particular emphasis on water, and its active role in modulating the interaction free energy among solutes, both biological and synthetic. The second is understanding the quantum world within the same dense material domain, including the direct evaluation of the spectroscopic signatures of molecular species and tracking the evolution of energy in molecular excited states. Most recently, I have emphasized understanding the time evolution of electronic photo-excited states, particularly in candidate photovoltaic organic materials. Having grown up along with the explosion in computational capacity, I depend on computational methods as a route to study molecular processes. We are constantly involved in method development to open up access to increasingly complex dynamical features of chemical systems, such as quantized motion of low mass nuclei (especially protons), electronic energy dissipation, and energy or charge transfer.

Michael Diehl

Michael Diehl uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the complex function of proteins when they interact as functional groups. By combining elements from nanotechnology, protein engineering, advanced optics, and biophysics, he is developing biosynthetic techniques to manipulate multi-component architectures of protein assemblies with nanometer-scale precision. He is also developing new protein detection technologies that address the challenges of determining where and when proteins interact in cells.

Diehl's Macromolecular Systems Bioengineering Group studies the cooperative dynamics of proteins and their operation as highly organized and integrated assemblies; develops engineering approaches that enable model systems of natural multiprotein assemblies to be reconstructed in vitro while preserving the intricate molecular features of these assemblies; and uses instrumentation to investigate the collective protein dynamics of these systems with single-molecule precision. This research concentrates on in vitro modeling of intracellular trafficking and transport, and encoding the self-organized mechanics of internally driven filaments.

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Ashok Veeraraghavan

Dr. Veeraraghavan is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. He received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002, and his master's and Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Ashok joined the ECE Department in 2010. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.
Veeraraghavan is co-developer of FlatCam, a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera. Making it practical are the sophisticated computer algorithms that process what the sensor detects and converts the sensor measurements into images and videos. FlatCams may find use in security or disaster-relief applications and as flexible, foldable, wearable cameras, and even disposable cameras.
The same team has also developed FlatScope, a flat microscope and software system that can decode and trigger neurons on the surface of the brain. The project is part of a $65 million effort by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a high-resolution neural interface. Among many long-term goals, the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program hopes to compensate for a person's loss of vision or hearing by delivering digital information directly to parts of the brain that can process it. The Rice ECE team, in collaboration with Yale University, will receive $4 million over four years to develop the optical hardware and its software interface.

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Naomi Halas

In our multidisciplinary group we focus on experimental methods drawn from a variety of disciplines, including chemistry, the clean-room nanofabrication techniques of electrical device engineers, and even biological assembly methods, to create new, controlled nanostructures with unique optical properties. Our major area of interest is in materials with collective electron oscillations, known as surface plasmons.  More recently we have begun to integrate these materials with other media, such as semiconductor quantum dots, bulk semiconducting media, fluids, optically active (fluorescent) molecules, and biomolecules. We perform a variety of optical spectroscopies and imaging measurements on our structures, to characterize our structures as quantifiably as possible. We work closely with theorists in the Nordlander group, and others, to understand and refine our systems.  We also collaborate with numerous other experimental groups on topics of mutual interdisciplinary interest, such as biomedical applications, single-molecule sensing, and energy applications.

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Palash Bharadwaj

The Bharadwaj Group focuses on the optical and electrical properties of nanomaterials and next generation of optoelectronic devices based on control over nanoscale light matter-interaction. We are interested in optoelectronic characterization of functional nano materials, and are engaged in creating low-dimensional metal-semiconductor hybrid mesoscale materials and devices for applications ranging from solid state lighting to quantum computing.

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Guru Naik

The Naik Lab specializes in nanophotonics – a border where optics meets nanotechnology to deliver optical devices with unprecedented functionalities. Our research is interdisciplinary spreading across physics, materials, chemistry and engineering.  While we push the frontiers of knowledge by scientific exploration, we develop novel technologies that impact our society – next generation renewable energy technology, imaging and chemical detection.

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Jacob Robinson

The Robinson research group uses nanofabrication technology to create devices that can manipulate and monitor neural circuit activity. The Robinson group believes that nanotechnologies capable of controlling and recording specific cells and circuits within the brain will reveal fundamental principles of brain function and advance the treatment of neurological disorders. In our lab we develop a wide range of these "nano-neurotechnologies" including  nanoelectrodes for neural stimulation and recording, nanophotonic neural interfaces, and nanomagnetic neuromodulation

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Doug Natelson

The Natelson Group uses nanostructure-based techniques, measuring the electrical, magnetic, and optical properties of systems to address open problems in condensed matter physics. A variety of unusual phenomena arise as matter is confined and examined on dimensions approaching the atomic scale, and an understanding of the emergent properties of matter on these scales will likely be essential for future technologies.

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Angel Marti

Our research group is interested in the design and synthesis of multifunctional molecular constructs for the treatment and diagnosis of amyloid forming diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease, in addition to the development of sensors and the in vivo and in vitro detection of DNA and mRNA. 5.2 million people suffer Alzheimer's in the United States. By 2050, this number will increase to 14 million unless a cure is found. Finding novel treatments for Alzheimer's disease represents a challenge that will involve different scientific disciplines. Our approach involves the use of molecular scissors to degrade and solubilize amyloid deposits. These amyloid scissors consist of a recognition element capable of selectively binding to amyloid plaques, bound to an artificial protease capable of cleave proteins, similar to those in amyloid plaques. We also aim to attach paramagnetic species such as gadolinium compounds to amyloid recognition elements for use as diagnosis tools in conjuction with MRI techniques. Other projects involve the design of probes for the detection and monitoring of DNA and mRNA in different media. This will include the use of hybridization probes with an oligonucleotide sequence complementary to the target sequence of interest, and a fluorescent reporter group capable of changing its photophysical properties upon binding to the target sequence. Our group is also interested in investigating the changes in structure that the protein alpha-synuclein undergoes when it binds to membranes and small molecules such as melanin. Alpha-synuclein has been associated with the pathology of Parkinson's disease. We will use spectroscopic methods such as FTIR and circular dichroism to determine the changes in structure of this protein when interacting with different molecular and supramolecular agents.

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