For more than 30 years, researchers have been creating quantum dots—tiny, crystalline, nanoscale semiconductors with remarkable optical and electronic properties.

They’ve applied them to improve television sets, for example, to greatly enhance color. A host of other applications are being pursued, involving integrated circuits, solar cells, computing, medical imaging, and inkjet printing, among others.

But quantum dot synthesis has occurred largely by trial and error, because little has been understood about how the chemicals involved in making quantum dots—some highly toxic—actually interact to form the resulting nanoparticles.

That may be about to change. In a paper in Nature Communications, Todd Krauss, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester, and PhD student Leah Frenette, the lead author, describe the underlying mechanisms involved in the formation of a widely used class of quantum dots that use cadmium and selenium compounds as their molecular precursors.

Ironically, the team discovered that, at one point during this process, the safer, more controllable compounds now employed decompose into the same highly toxic compounds that were used in initial quantum dot production 30 years ago.

“We have essentially gone ‘back to the future’ with our discovery,” says Krauss. “What Leah discovered was, during the quantum dot synthesis reaction, the currently used compounds decompose into the very chemicals we have been trying to avoid for decades, which then react to form the quantum dots.”

The findings, Krauss says, constitute a “fundamental discovery” that could potentially:

1. Remove much of the guesswork in production of cadmium/selenium quantum dots that has led to inconsistencies and irreproducibility, hindering industrial applications.
2. Alert researchers and companies working on large scale quantum dot syntheses that highly toxic hydrogen selenide and cadmium akyl complexes are still “lurking” as part of the synthesis process.
3. Help explain the chemical behavior of phosphines used in a broad range of quantum dot reactions at high temperatures.

Read more here.

The port of Veracruz in 1615. (University of Texas Libraries photo)

Just before dawn on May 18, 1683, pirates stormed the port city of Veracruz on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, easily overwhelming its Spanish military defense. For two weeks, the buccaneers raped and looted, pillaged and exhorted steep ransoms for the release of valuable hostages.

“But the ultimate crime is what they did in the end,” says Pablo Sierra Silva, an assistant professor of history. “They kidnapped the entire population of African descent, because slavery is expanding in the English and French colonies at this time and there’s now a market for such captives.”

Between 1,000 to 1,500 Veracruzanos —some slaves, some formerly free residents of Veracruz singled out by the pirates for their darker skin—were sold to slave masters in St. Domingue and nascent Charleston, South Carolina.

“That singular extraction and then dispersal of these people has never been studied,” says Sierra Silva.

His research for a book tracing the paths of those forgotten Afro-Veracruzanos got a big boost recently when the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded him a $50,400 fellowship to support the project, titled Mexican Atlantic: Contraband, Captivity and the 1683 Raid on Veracruz.

The grant will enable him to spend the next 12 months traveling to colonial archives and repositories in the US, Spain, and Mexico. He’ll work at the Archive of the Indies in Seville; the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island; the University of South Carolina; the South Carolina Historical Society; and the College of Charleston.

Matthew Lenoe, an associate professor of history and chair of the department, says he is “tremendously excited” about Sierra Silva’s NEH award.

“Pablo richly deserves it,” Lenoe says. “His work on the history of African slavery in Mexico and its ramifications throughout the Atlantic World breaks paths into an important and understudied area. Innovative and timely, it is also based on research in rarely used 17th-century archives.”

Read more here.

The latest AS&E PumpPrimer II awards go to nine scholars and researchers involved in bold new research directions. The seed funding is designed to help faculty secure extramural funding.

The recipients are:

Mitchell Anthamatten, professor of chemical engineering, and Onur Ozcalik, a PhD student in his lab, for a project to synthesize novel ABA triblock copolymer networks to improve the stability and ion transfer capability of fuel cell exchange membranes.

Kara Bren, professor of chemistry, to develop novel biomolecular catalysts to reduce nitrogen oxides to ammonium in water. This would produce ammonium with less energy input compared to current methods, which also use fossil fuels. Reduction of nitrogen oxides also could be used to remediate groundwater pollutants.

John Covach, professor of music theory and director of the Institute for Popular Music; Henry Kautz, professor of computer science and director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science; and Lauren Di Monte, data and research impact librarian. Their project is to develop a detailed, web-based list of musical works (albums and singles) from the history of popular music, to support the growing interest in corpus study in this field.

Todd Krauss, professor, and Ellen Matson, assistant professor, both of the Department of Chemistry, to explore the use of quantum dots in combination with metal molecular catalysts to achieve solar driven water oxidation — separating water into oxygen and hydrogen. This could overcome a major challenge to using artificial photosynthesis as a way to capture and store the energy from sunlight.

Jannick Rolland, the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering, to support spatial light modulator equipment to test freeform optics during their manufacturing stages, not just the finished pieces, with industry partners aligned with the Center for Freeform Optics.

The PumpPrimer program also includes  PumpPrimer I and Researcher Mobility funds which can be applied for at any time. Between 2014 and 2017, a total of 40 PumpPrimer 1 and II grants and research mobility grants, totaling almost $1 million, resulted in a return on investment of more than $8.8 million in extramural funds awarded.

APPLICATIONS FOR NEXT PUMPPRIMER II AWARDS DUE FEB. 23

• Typical budgets will be up to $50K.
• Cost-sharing with departmental resources is encouraged.
• All eligibility criterion is enumerated in the Guidelines.

Applicants for PumpPrimer II are expected to submit a proposal for external funding within 18 months of the allocation of intramural support. PumpPrimer grants will require a brief final survey/final report to help us evaluate the effectiveness of this program. Awardees will be expected to review for the program in future cycles.

Faculty in Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in Engineering to Cindy Gary.

William Jones, the Charles F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry, and Xi-Cheng Zhang, the M. Parker Givens Professor of Optics, who have received prestigious Humboldt Research Awards. The awards will enable them to spend up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards annually to academics “whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.” Read more here.

Michele Rucci has joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as a professor after serving as a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University. Rucci’s research program combines experimental and theoretical approaches to study mechanisms of visual perception. His primary interests lie in the elucidation of how motor and sensory processes interact in the human brain and how motor behavior contributes to the extraction and processing of visual information. Rucci and his colleagues have explained the functional roles of microscopic eye movements that take place while we fixate on an object of interest. He has demonstrated that these miniature eye movements play important roles in reformatting the visual input to be processed efficiently and for systematically exploring objects during tasks that require high spatial precision. He received Laurea (MA) and PhD degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Florence and the Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa, respectively. Before joining the faculty of Boston University, he was a fellow in computational neuroscience at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego.

(This is part of a monthly series to help principal investigators understand their role in ensuring that human subject protection requirements are met in their studies.)

Department of Health and Human Service and Food & Drug Administration regulations (45 CFR 46; 21 CFR 56) define specific criteria that human subject research must meet in order for an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to approve the research.

A critical, yet often overlooked, step in the protocol development process is to objectively evaluate study protocols against these criteria prior to IRB submission. Doing so will help facilitate IRB review of the proposal, with the intent of minimizing IRB stipulations.

Over the upcoming months, as part the ‘PI Oversight Tip of the Month’ series, each criterion for IRB approval will be reviewed and summarized.

This month we will look at approval criteria #2: “risks to subjects are reasonable in relation to anticipated benefits.” In evaluating this criterion, it’s helpful to break it down into these steps:

• First, consider the risks and burdens of the research. What are the risks to individual subjects and, if any, the risks to families of subjects, groups of subjects, or society at-large? What is the likelihood, magnitude, and reversibility of experiencing those risks? Are there any particular risks that might require special attention, intervention, or follow-up?
• Second, consider what steps will be taken to minimize or mitigate the risks identified. Are you unnecessarily exposing subjects to risks, perhaps by collecting information irrelevant to the aims of the research? Are you incorporating procedures that will already be performed as part of routine care, when possible? Are you following routine screening procedures when applicable? Are you monitoring specific outcomes or measures over the course of the study to continually re-assess eligibility and/or investigator-initiated withdrawal criteria?
• Third, evaluate the potential benefits to the subject and ensure that they are provided to the greatest extent possible. Remember, benefits to subjects are intended to directly benefit individual subjects (not a larger group of subjects or society at-large). Direct benefits typically include some sort of health or behavioral improvement. This does not include payments, reimbursements, or incentives and does not include extraneous benefits that are unrelated to the conduct of the research (adjunct medical services or the benefit of gaining understanding about a certain condition or diagnosis).
• Lastly, weigh the risks against the benefits of the research. Generally, the ‘riskier’ a study, the greater the magnitude of benefit must be. Conversely, the lower the risk a study involves, the more acceptable an uncertain or no direct benefit becomes. If there are no direct benefits to individual subjects (and there often aren’t), consider whether the benefits to society, from the knowledge that will be gained with the research, outweigh and justify the risk to subjects. If societal benefits do not outweigh the individual risks to subjects, the research cannot be approved or conducted.

Stay tuned for criteria #3, “selection of subjects is equitable,” which will be highlighted next month. For the previously highlighted criteria, see the November 10^, 2017 edition of Research Connections.

The Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) Winter Boot Camp is an opportunity to learn how to program or learn a new programming language. It is also an opportunity to pick up essential technical computing skills to help with research projects or course work.

The six-week program, January 23 through March 1, helps students, postdocs, research staff, and faculty learn new programming languages and sharpen their computing and data analytics skills. Classes are designed for beginners and cover basic topics to give enough direction to move on to self-learning tutorials or other more advanced coursework.

Each language or topic is an individual “module” that will take place during 1.5 hour lectures over 3 to 9 days. Each programming module is independent, and participants may sign up for one or more modules.

Classes will be taught in the VISTA Collaboratory on the first floor of Carlson Library. Click here for a list of courses and to register. Space is limited, so register early.

The University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) will fund up to four $3,000 awards to promote inter-institutional research collaboration between faculty, staff, and students from the University and from Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI).

The RCMI program, supported by the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities, develops the research infrastructure to conduct state-of-the-art biomedical research and foster the next generation of researchers from underrepresented populations. See a list of RCMI institutions here.

The RCMI Scholarly Exchange Program promotes training opportunities, networking, project development, research placement, and pilot research data gathering with the goal of producing abstracts, publications, or joint-grant applications among colleagues from different cultures, disciplines, and academic appointments.

The application deadline is January 31.

For further information, contact Timothy Dye or Ivelisse Rivera.

Read more here.

Songfeng Han, Optics, “Diffuse Correlation Tomography for Femoral Graft Blood Flow Monitoring.” 2 p.m. January 11, 2018. Goergen 109. Advisor: Regine Choe.

Yuchen Wang, Biomedical Engineering, “Development of Controlled Release Systems for Fracture-Targeted Therapeutic Delivery.” 9 a.m. January 11, 2018. Sloan Auditorium (Goergen 101). Advisor: Danielle Benoit.

Zachary Murphy, Pathology, “STAT3 regulates primitive erythroid maturation both dependent and independently of erythropoietin signaling.” 1 p.m. January 18, 2018. 1-7619 Lower Adolph (Medical Center). Advisor: James Palis.

Meng Zhu, Electrical Engineering, “Energy-Discounted Computing and Supercapacitor Energy Buffering for Resource-Constrained Systems.” 1:30 p.m. January 22, 2018. Computer Studies Building Room 426. Advisor: Kai Shen.

Jan. 23: CIRC Winter Boot Camp begins. Helps students, postdocs, research staff, and faculty learn new programming languages and sharpen their computing and data analytics skills. Click here for a list of courses and to register. Space is limited, so register early.

Jan. 31: Deadline to apply for Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) awards to promote inter-institutional research collaboration between faculty, staff, and students from the University and from Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI). For further information, contact Timothy Dye or Ivelisse Rivera. Read more here.

Jan. 31: Deadline to enter the fifth annual America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent Student Competition,  in which students from across the University compete for a chance to present their regulatory science ideas at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additional information, an entry form, and instructions on how to apply are on the America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent web page. Submit entry forms to Scott Steele by January 31, 2018.

Feb. 1: Deadline to submit initial abstracts for Public Health Science (PHS) pilot projects to stimulate new collaborations with PHS faculty. Proposals are being solicited that support collaborative relationships between investigators who do not have a recent history (past 3 years) of joint funding or who want to expand their current collaborative efforts in new directions and for whom the pilot project would be catalytic in their effort to obtain extramural funding. More information can be found at the PHS website.

Feb. 8: “Deserts, Dust, and Iron Fertilization of the North Pacific Ocean: Cause or Consequence of Global Cooling?” Presented by Carmala Garzione, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Feldman Ballroom, Frederick Douglass Commons. Click here to register.

Feb 23: Deadline to apply for University Research Awards. The Request for Proposals and application are available here. Completed applications should be directed to adele.coelho@rochester.edu.

Feb. 23: Deadline to apply for AS&E PumpPrimer II Awards, which provide seed money to stimulate extramural funding for innovative and high-risk projects otherwise difficult to launch. Faculty in Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in Engineering to Cindy Gary.

March 1: “Doing Better Next Time: Policy Lessons from the Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery.” Presented by Narayana Kocherlakota, Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.

April 12: “The American Health Paradox: What’s Missing?” Presented by Nancy Bennett, professor of medicine and public health sciences, director of the Center for Community Health, and co-director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Helen Wood Hall. Click here to register.