Please join Yale Chemistry for the 2025 John Gamble Kirkwood Award Lecture in materials chemistry with Prof. Teri W. Odom, Joan Husting Madden and William H. Madden, Jr. Professor of Chemistry, Northwestern University.
Summary: Nanoscale materials play key roles in diverse areas ranging from energy storage to communication to medicine because their physical length scales are commensurate with those of the underlying mechanisms. For example, charge, energy, and ion transport as well as receptor-protein and cell-cell interactions all occur at the nanoscale. However, for finer control over more complex and orthogonal processes, new approaches are required to achieve multi-scale nanostructures. This talk will discuss complementary strategies on how to design gold nanostructures with shape control approaching 1 nm for applications in biosensing and nanophotonics. First, we will discuss how arrays of nanoparticle dimers can function as nanocavities for lasing action and also be transformed into core-shell structures advantageous for chemical sensing and catalytic reactions. Second, we will describe how fabricated nanoparticle arrays can be chemically converted into spiky shaped nanoelectrodes for advanced electrochemical biosensing. Finally, we will discuss how colloidal gold nanostars can function as single-particle sensors of targeted ligand-receptor interactions in live cells. Exquisite control over hierarchical nanostructures by bridging the gap between synthetic, chemical methods and engineered, fabrication procedures offers promise to address bottlenecks in current challenges as well as open unanticipated applications.
