Title:

Carbon for Materials and Medical Applications

Speaker:

Prof. James M. Tour

Affiliation:

Rice University

When:

Friday, November 2, 2012 at 2:00:00 PM   Add to Calendar

Where:

MRDC Building, Room 4211

Host:

Satish Kumar
satish.kumar@mse.gatech.edu
404-894-7550

Abstract

Several new routes to the growth and manipulation of graphene will be discussed. This will include the preparation of large-area (2.3 millimeters) single-domain graphene grown on simple copper foils, preparation of Bernal-stacked bilayer and trilayer graphene, and a seamless graphene-nanotube hybrid material which shows the requisite 7-membered rings at the interface junction, and device applications of these new structures. Secondly, the use of carbon nanoparticles as high capacity annihilators of reactive oxygen species (ROS) will be presented and the in vivo use of these non-toxic constructs to restore cerebral blood flow following traumatic brain injury (TBI), and especially when the TBI is accompanied by hemorrhagic shock.

Biography

James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Syracuse University, his Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue University, and postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. After spending 11 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in 1999 where he is presently the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. Tour’s scientific research areas include nanoelectronics, graphene electronics, carbon nanovectors for medical applications, green carbon research for enhanced oil recovery and environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction, graphene photovoltaics, chemical self-assembly, flame retarding polymer additives, carbon nanotube and graphene synthetic modifications, carbon composites, hydrogen storage on nanoengineered carbon scaffolds, synthesis of single-molecule nanomachines which include molecular motors and nanocars, use of the NanoKids concept for K-12 education in nanoscale science, Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero science educational package development for middle school education, and methods for retarding chemical terrorist attacks. Tour has over 450 research publications and over 50 patents, with an H-index = 77, average citations per paper = 72, total citations = 30,000, averaging more than 2500 citations per year for each of the years 2006 to 2011.