Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics, will receive more than $525,000 over five years for the work, which is to begin in July 2016. His research centers on the relationships between nanoscale structure and electrical function in organic materials for solar cells and electronics.

“One of the main things holding back the use of solar cells is the cost associated with them,” he says. “Organic solar cells provide a pathway toward low-cost, clean energy. Organic materials open new possibilities because they are lightweight and mechanically flexible, making it possible, for example, to integrate them into curved surfaces.”

Organic materials can also be processed near room temperature, Mativetsky notes, which is another factor that makes them attractive for flexible electronics.

Mativetsky, who blends principles of physics, chemistry and engineering in his research, says he’s motivated by a desire to work on systems that are relevant to society. He’d like to see solar cells integrated into disaster relief tents, for instance.

In his laboratory, students work at a 16-foot-long, nitrogen-filled glovebox as vacuum pumps vibrate and several solutions swirl in vials on a countertop stir plate. The glovebox maintains an environment a bit above atmospheric pressure, with less than 1 part per million of oxygen and humidity. Mativetsky has two atomic force microscopes, and his team uses additional equipment at Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory.

Mativetsky received seed funding through Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence program, which encourages work across multiple fields of inquiry and counts smart energy as a special area of interest. The preliminary results obtained by Mativetsky with fellow Binghamton physicist Joon Jang and chemist Alistair Lees provided a foundation for the NSF proposal. “We made it to the start line,” Mativetsky says. “Now we can do the research we set out to do.”

The core of that research will focus on molecule-based nanowires, filaments that are far, far thinner than a human hair and which often have special properties not found in materials at larger scales. Mativetsky is especially interested in how electric charge moves through these nanomaterials.

“We’re investigating the fundamentals of how nanoscale structuring affects charge photogeneration and charge transport,” he says.

Mativetsky believes these nanowires could improve organic solar cell performance and enable the manufacture of flexible solar cells that are thinner than a sheet of paper. Such solar cells might be less efficient than traditional ones made with silicon, he says, but they could produce more energy per gram of material.

Mativetsky, a native of Montreal who earned a doctorate in physics from McGill University in 2006, held post-doctoral fellowships at the Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute in France and at Princeton University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2012.

He is already the recipient of another $300,000 NSF grant, which supports research into graphene oxide with potential applications in flexible electronics, energy storage, sensors, composite materials and biomedical engineering.

A new $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program will enable Stephen Levy, assistant professor of physics, to study how DNA travels through carbon nanotubes.

“You can picture it like spaghetti being sucked through a straw,” he says.

A nanotube is a cylinder made from a sheet of carbon that’s just one atom thick. Fluids travel through these tiny tubes differently than they do through a large pipe, though scientists don’t know exactly why. Some experts hope that nanotubes will lead to a next-generation method of sequencing DNA. Nanotubes may also help scientists understand some aspects of how small molecules are transported into cells.

Levy has developed a way to study one carbon nanotube at a time. Other labs study thousands at once, or use electrical observations of how DNA moves through nanotubes. Levy’s team has developed a way to conduct electrical, optical and fluorescent observations of single-stranded DNA molecules at the same time. His lab has also pioneered a fabrication technique that makes it possible to integrate carbon nanotubes within small fluidic channels.

Levy, who received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond, earned a doctorate from the University of California Santa Barbara, where he did graduate work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He also did a post-doctoral stint with the University of Chicago at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. After that, Levy essentially switched fields, leaving particle physics behind and studying biophysics for four years at Cornell University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2010.

Today Levy draws on principles from physics, biology, chemistry and materials science in his research. He’s particularly interested in how DNA, the genetic material found in nearly all living things, travels through these nanotubes. The information in DNA can be thought of as a code of four chemical bases. These four bases pair up in different combinations. Some combinations — or “markers” — are unique to certain animals or molecules and can be used to identify them.

Levy’s research could enable the electrical detection of particular molecules. For instance, a sensor at a post office could be programmed to search for a specific DNA marker. “If you can read where that marker is, it’s almost like a bar code,” Levy says. “You don’t want to sequence every piece of schmutz that goes through there because it takes a long time and it’s fairly expensive. But if you have a quick way of identifying a dangerous molecule, that’s valuable.”

Bruce White worked with semiconductors and transistors at Motorola and Texas Instruments. But when he left industry for a position on Binghamton University’s faculty, the materials scientist decided to take his research in a new direction. “I didn’t want to just continue to work on transistors and memory,” White says. “I wanted to try to apply those tools to big problems that impact society.”

Energy is one of those big problems; in the United States, more than half of the energy we burn each year gets lost as heat instead of being put to use.

“We do all this work to get oil out of the ground and to refine it, but when we try to do some work with it, most of the energy goes out the exhaust pipe of a car or out the smokestack of a power plant,” White says. “Even if we could reclaim a small fraction of what we throw away as heat, that would have a significant impact on our energy use.”

There are ways to turn heat into electricity. If a material is hot on one side and cold on the other, the flow of heat from hot to cold can be turned into electricity. But most of the thermoelectric materials on the market today are not very good at doing that. The tricky part, White says, is getting the heat to flow through the material on the backs of electrons. In most materials, the heat flows in a wave that simply makes the material’s atoms vibrate faster. That’s not a useful phenomenon, and it ends up destroying the important hot-cold differential. In many materials, the vibration of atoms carries away 90 percent of the heat before it can be harnessed.

White’s goal is to create materials where the vibrational effects are minimized — or, in other words, where a larger percentage of the heat gets shuttled by electrons, creating a flow of electricity. He also thinks it’s important to make sure those materials are abundant and nontoxic.

White may have found a candidate in zinc oxide, a substance used in many brands of sunblock. Zinc oxide is abundant, cheap and safe, and it happens to be really good at moving electrons around. Unfortunately, in its normal state, zinc oxide has a molecular structure that transports heat by vibrating atoms instead of turning it into electricity.

By manipulating zinc oxide at the molecular level, White and his colleagues are able to make it better at generating electricity. First, they stretch the material into wires that measure 50 nanometers across. (That’s roughly 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.) That incredible thinness changes the way heat spreads through the material. Next, they embed the nanowires in a silica aerogel, a substance that’s terrible at conducting heat. Because of the interesting and unique interactions that occur at very small scales, nanowires can take on the properties of surrounding materials. In this case, the wires became very poor heat conductors. Their ability to conduct heat through atomic vibrations decreased by a factor of 10, so their efficiency in turning heat to electricity shot up. The results were published in April 2013 in Applied Physics Letters, the top journal in the field.

What’s particularly exciting about this discovery, White says, is that the materials of the wires and the aerogel can be mixed and matched to customize the thermoelectric properties for different applications — such as harnessing waste heat from a power plant, car or household furnace. Since aerogels are nearly transparent, White even envisions making window coatings that exploit indoor versus outdoor temperature differences to generate electricity.

With the right materials, it may be possible to eliminate the internal combustion engine altogether. White and his lab members think they may have a way of doing that. It all comes down to silicon, which is an excellent semiconductor — that’s why our electronic devices are silicon-based — but is also really good at conducting heat via atomic vibrations. White’s group is getting rid of those vibrations by building a silicon-tin composite using a new fabrication technique that grows the material layer by layer.

The work caught the attention of the Naval Research Office, which provides funding for White’s research. “It’s his fabrication method that really makes it different,” says Robert Walters, head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Solid State Devices Branch. “Bruce has developed the fabrication technique that we feel will actually achieve the layered silicon-tin structure, which we think we really need to have to de-couple silicon’s thermal and electrical properties. … It’s a very good idea. It’s innovative and it’s different from other things that we’ve seen.”

The new composite material has a thermal conductivity that’s 1,000 times lower than regular silicon. The group hopes to make it three times lower still by making the crystal purer and more evenly patterned. If the thermal conductivity gets that low, the material would be so good at turning heat into electricity that it could power a car with the burning of a flame.

That’s far off in the future, though. As they work on refining the materials they’ve already developed, White’s group is on the brink of creating less extreme materials that could still have a big impact. Heat-harnessing materials, which could be retrofitted onto a car’s tailpipe or radiator, could soon generate enough electricity to power the car’s electronics. “That alone could increase the fuel efficiency by a few miles per gallon,” White says. “When you think about integrating it over the entire automotive fleet, that makes a huge difference.”

Amber Doiron, assistant professor of bioengineering, says current methods of assessing atherosclerosis — commonly known as hardening of the arteries — are not terribly accurate. Some 30 percent of deaths worldwide can be attributed to the disease, which occurs when fat, cholesterol and other particles form hard structures called plaques in the walls of arteries.

“It’s really a guessing game right now,” she says. “Doctors use factors like blood pressure and cholesterol level to get an idea of a patient’s risk. Then they use plaque size as a general measure of whether a person has the disease. But there’s a fairly poor correlation between plaque size and heart attack or stroke.”

Doiron, who has an interest in molecular imaging as well as expertise in nanoscience, wants to help physicians do a better job of identifying which plaques are cause for concern.

She and a Temple University colleague recently received a two-year, $418,000 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to support this project. It’s a notable success in part because this was Doiron’s first National Institutes of Health grant proposal.

The researchers will use a combination of polymers and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for the study. The nanoparticle is sensitive to oxidative stress, which occurs in atherosclerosis and has been linked to patients who have a higher prevalence of heart attack and stroke. Using an MRI scan, the researchers will be able to see how active the nanoparticle is, which will indicate whether the plaque is stable.

“A stroke or a heart attack doesn’t necessarily come when a plaque fully blocks the flow of blood through an artery,” Doiron explains. “What happens is the plaque ruptures and the gunk that underlies the plaque is exposed to blood and a clot forms. The clot builds quickly — on an hour time scale as opposed to over years — and the clot can grow there until it blocks flow, or it can dislodge and block flow somewhere else. Most heart attacks do not occur from a full blockage of plaque. It happens because the plaque bursts. Same thing with strokes. That’s why size isn’t necessarily indicative of how dangerous a plaque is.”

The discovery of a molecule or a cell type that indicated which plaques are safe and which ones are dangerous would be a huge breakthrough, Doiron says. She thinks oxidative stress may be such an indicator.

“Atherosclerosis is an incredibly complex disease that progresses over decades,” Doiron says. “It’s hard to tell who’s walking around with plaques that are stable, relatively safe, and who has plaques that may cause a heart attack tomorrow. For some patients, the first sign of trouble is a heart attack.”

Medications like the insulin she has injected every day since she was 16.

Now, as a biochemistry and neuroscience major at Binghamton University, she’s taking the first steps: helping to understand how nanoparticles can improve rechargeable batteries.

There’s no disconnect here: The skills and knowledge she’ll acquire working on Assistant Professor Gretchen Mahler’s project can be taken in many directions.

The connection, MacAneney said, is this: Industry leaders are interested in using nanoparticles of vanadium oxide as a cathode in rechargeable lithium ion batteries. “But before they can use nanoparticles in batteries, they need to understand the health effects,” she said, both on production workers making the products and the everyday user.

Vanadium in various forms can help lithium batteries store more energy, discharge more power and recharge faster — perfect for any number of smart energy projects from hybrid-electric or all-electric vehicles to household energy storage.

That is, if it doesn’t harm people. Acute vanadium oxide exposure in its larger form has been linked to increased bronchial infections, pneumonia, inflamed tissues and irritated eyes, throat, lungs and nasal tissue — even nervous disorders and paralysis. The health effects of vanadium oxide nanoparticles have never been studied.

“Our hypothesis is that when these nanoparticles come in contact with epithelial cells, it’ll cause inflammation and absorption,” MacAneney said.

The data will help Mahler and a colleague at the State University of New York at Potsdam to prepare a proposal for grant funding. And it’s a good project to help put a new researcher through her paces, using newly acquired skills from eight weeks of lab training.

“I put them through a pretty rigorous training program,” Mahler said. It weeds out people unsuited to a life of research and keeps the new researcher and her colleagues safe. “She is just starting to dive into the nanoparticle work.”

But understanding how a body can absorb nanoparticles relates directly to McAneney’s interest in medication. Insulin today cannot easily survive gastric acids, making oral insulin impractical.

“But can you encapsulate it in something to protect it?” she asked. “It wouldn’t degrade in the stomach.”

Interesting question, and one McAneney plans to keep asking on her way to a doctorate and perhaps a medical degree, too.

David Klotzkin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton, says that’s not good enough. He and a colleague, Ian Papautsky, director of the University of Cincinnati’s BioMicrosystems Lab and its Micro/Nano Fabrication Engineering Research Center, have developed a technology to accelerate testing and enhance it in a number of other ways.

Klotzkin is an expert on the properties of light. Much of his research has focused intensely on photonics — the science of photons, elementary light particles — since he earned his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan.

As a senior engineer at Lasertron Inc., a manufacturer of photonics components, he developed high-speed laser modulation equipment used in multiplexing — the combining of multiple message signals or data streams, such as many television channels or telephone conversations that share a single cable to maximize the use of an expensive resource.

As an American Society for Engineering Education summer faculty fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he designed circuits that are essential for free-space optical communications. This low-power, high-data-volume alternative to conventional radio frequency communications, with military and civilian applications, is quickly evolving thanks to improved laser technology and compact optical systems.

Klotzkin began collaborating with Papautsky while he was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati. At the time, Klotzkin was involved in research on organic light emitters, thin films of organic matter on glass that emit light when exposed to an energy source to excite their electrons.

Papautsky, a fellow faculty member, was studying microfluidics, the science of how fluids behave when they are manipulated in tiny spaces. He is a leader in development of what’s called “lab-on-a-chip,” which integrates several laboratory tests on a tiny chip.

With a single inexpensive, disposable lab-on-a-chip, it may be possible to conduct — in the field — tests that, not so long ago, had to be conducted individually in a laboratory remote from where the sample was acquired. It’s also possible to perform those tests simultaneously and quickly, using samples as small as a millionth of a liter.

“In the microfluidics community, we’ve had this idea of small, disposable platforms that could be used for many different tests for a long time,” Papautsky says.

Klotzkin helped him find the way. Since different materials emit different light waves, it is possible to use light to detect the presence of disease-causing micro-organisms such as viruses and bacteria.

“Fluorescence is one of the most commonly used analytic techniques in the biosciences,” Klotzkin explains. Here’s how it works in the typical microfluidic immunoassay: Whatever is being tested — bacteria, viruses or some other type of organic molecules — is tagged with fluorescently labeled antibodies. An excitation light stimulates the dye to fluoresce. The wavelength of the fluorescence — essentially the “fingerprint” of the disease-causing agent — is observed through a filter that suppresses the excitation light.

There was a problem, though. “There was no way to conveniently build filters into the micro system,” Klotzkin says. Consequently, the detector signal emitted by the dye was inevitably overwhelmed by the excitation light.

That is, until he and Papautsky found a simple solution. Using polarizers, they were able to isolate the excitation light from the detector. While the excitation light is polarized, the fluorescence from the dye is emitted with random polarization. Then, when a second polarizer is positioned 90 degrees from the first, the intensity of the excitation light is dramatically reduced as it crosses the two polarizers.

“This solution works with any combination of excitation and emission light,” Klotzkin says, “even if two signals overlap in wavelength.”

Klotzkin and Papautsky published their first paper on their solution in 2007. The following year, Klotzkin joined Binghamton’s faculty. Since then, they have continued to collaborate on lab-on-a-chip models that employ the polarized light approach. They’ve demonstrated the efficacy of this technique with what Papautsky calls “low-hanging fruit,” miniature and portable oxygen sensors for firefighters. Labs-on-a-chip for blood analyses are next.

“We are working toward the goal of putting a ‘lab’ in everyone’s office,” Klotzkin says, “and putting fluorescence in a microchip is one step toward that. More than half of emergency room patients require at least one blood test. With this technology they can get results immediately, from a much smaller volume of blood. Rather than send a vial of blood out to a lab, the doctor can put a drop of blood into a microfluidic system and analyze it instantly.”

Not only do labs-on-a-chip produce potentially life-saving results more quickly, they can perform several tests simultaneously. With patents pending, the engineers’ work may be about to pay off.

“There was a lot of excitement about the lab-on-a-chip idea back in the early 2000s,” Papautsky says, “but then a number of start-ups failed and investors pulled back. Things got even worse when the economy went into recession.” Now that the economy is rebounding, the inventors’ concept could result in a new product in the near future.