Events

Description:

The December GGPF lecture will be given by U.C. Berkeley's Prof.
Nitash P. Balsara. Prof. Balsara spoke earlier this year at the Stanford
Flory Symposium, and the GGPF is pleased to host him for this presentation. Please come to meet Prof. Balsara and hear about some excellent work in the area of polymer blends.

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DECEMBER GGPF Dinner Lecture:

Tuesday, Dec. 11
Michael's at Shoreline
Mountain View

"ORGANIZING HIGHLY IMMISCIBLE POLYMERS"

Prof. Nitash P. Balsara
Chemical Engineering Department
University of California, Berkeley http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/~npbgrp/

Abstract

Mixtures of highly incompatible A/B homopolymers were
organized into microemulsions and lamellar phases by
the introduction of a suitably designed A-C diblock
copolymer. This is a significant departure from the
large body of previous experimental and theoretical
work in the field of polymer blends, which relied on
the surfactancy of A-B block (and graft) copolymers
for organizing A/B mixtures. We use small angle
neutron scattering to demonstrate that 50/50 mixtures
of highly immiscible polyolefins such as polyisobutylene
(PIB), polyethylene (PE) can be organized into
microemulsions and lamellar phases by the addition of
a symmetric polyethylene-block-head-to-head polypropylene copolymer (PE-PP). Along the isopleth, the phase diagram of these ternary blends exhibits many of the characteristics of "fish-shaped" phase diagrams found in oil/water mixtures stabilized by surfactants with balanced hydrophobic and hydrophilic tendencies. We thus believe that our observations in PIB/PE/PE-PP mixtures are due to the balance between PIB-philic and PIB-phobic tendencies of our PE-PP surfactant. Our work demonstrates a pathway for designing balanced surfactants in systems such as hydrocarbon polymer mixtures wherein specific interactions and permanent dipoles are absent.

Speaker Background:

Nitash P. Balsara was born and raised in Bombay. He went to the Indian Institute ofTechnology at Kanpur where he graduated with a bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering in 1982. He earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1988. He did post-doctoral research at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, and at Exxon Research and Engineering Company in Annandale, New Jersey. In 1992, he oined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York. He moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 where he is currently a professor of Chemical Engineering. His research is concerned with nanostructure formation and phase transitions in polymer materials. He received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the John H. Dillon Medal for Polymer Physics, from the American Physical Society, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher- Scholar Award.

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PRACTICAL DETAILS

DATE: Tuesday, Dec. 11

Timing: 6 PM social hour
7 PM dinner
8 PM lecture

Cost: $30
half price students, retired, unemployed
free for just the lecture at 8PM
(but please let us know for headcount)

Deadline for registration: 5 PM, Friday, Dec. 7

If web-site registration is working, please register on the web:
https://ggpf.mystagingwebsite.com/
Otherwise, register by replying to this email or by contacting
Clayton Henderson
claytonh@us.ibm.com
408-256-6599
You should receive confirmation of your registration; if not, please contact us again.

PLEASE SPECIFY YOUR DINNER SELECTION, NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS,
AND AFFILIATION

Dinner choices: broiled salmon
chicken Florentine (stuffed with spinach)
wild mushroom crepes (vegetarian)

Note that we must request that you be liable for your registration fee if you register and do not attend; cancellation is allowed up to the registration deadline.

DIRECTIONS:

From 101 in Mountain View, take the Shoreline Boulevard
Exit, turning toward the bay. Drive past the Shoreline Amphitheater and go straight ahead, entering into Shoreline Park. After a mile or so inside the park, a sign for Michael's will direct you to turn left into the parking lot for Michael's.
Address: 2960 N Shoreline Blvd.
Restaurant phone: 650-962-1014
(do not call restaurant for reservations)

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UPCOMING GGPF EVENTS:

JANUARY GGPF Dinner Lecture

Jan. 15, Mountain View
Mahesh G. Samant, IBM Almaden Research Center
"IBM's Latest Flat Panel Displays:
A Journey from Science to Technology"
Joint meeting with Society for Applied Spectroscopy

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Other events of possible interest to the
GGPF audience:

NOVEMBER

Nov. 28 (Tonight!!!), Mountain View
Society for Applied Spectroscopy Dinner Lecture
"Incyte Microarray Systems", Thomas Theriault,
Senior Director of R&D, Incyte Genomics.
NOTE: too late for normal registration.
Contact:
James Chesko, 510-923-3896, jdchesko@yahoo.com
OR steve_rabin@yahoo.com.

DECEMBER

Dec. 1, San Jose State University
Saturday morning 8-12
"Materials Information Searching on the Internet"
Sponsored by local chapter of ASM.
http://www.asm-scv.org/
Limited space, preference given to ASMI members.
Contact Dr. Richard Chung, SJSU Dept. of
Materials & Chemical Engineering
wrchung@email.sjsu.edu

Dec. 12, Millbrae
Northern California Pharmaceutical Discussion Group
Dinner Lecture: "Studying Cancer on a Genomic
Scale Using DNA Microarrays", David Botstein, Ph.D.
Professor and Chairman, Dept. of Genetics,
Stanford University School of Medicine
www.ncpdg.org

Dec. 12, location tbd
tentative ASM local dinner meeting
"Materials in Sports Equipment"
http://www.asm-scv.org/

Dec. 12, Sunnyvale
IEEE/CPMT dinner lecture:
"Preventing Thermal Stress Failures in Microelectronics Packaging" -- Dr. Ephraim Suhir, Iolon Inc.

www.cpmt.org/scv/

Dec. 17, San Jose
PTI short course
Intro to Optical MEMS for BioSensing and Communications http://www.pti-inc.com/mems.html

JANUARY 2002

Jan. 19-25, San Jose
Photonics West 2002
http://spie.org/Conferences/Programs/02/pw/
Includes sessions on
Biomedical Optics
Optoelectronics
Electronic Imaging
and many engineering short courses, including
optoelectronics & MEMS packaging (SC400)
design of plastic optical systems (SC384)
photolithography for micro-optics (SC454)
structural adhesives for optical bonding (SC015)
biochips (SC259)
microfab techniques for microfluids & bioMEMS(SC437)
and several on microscopy and spectroscopy http://spie.org/Conferences/Programs/02/pw/ShortCourses.html

Jan. 20-24, Las Vegas
Annual IEEE International MEMS Conference http://mems.caltech.edu/mems2002.html

FEBRUARY

Feb. 11-15
AVS 3rd International Conference on Microelectronics
& Interfaces
http://www.avs.org/icmi/call02/default.html

Feb. 13, tbd
Tentative ASM dinner meeting
"Micron Scale CAT Scanning"
http://www.asm-scv.org/

Feb. 22, Stanford
The Fifth Flory Conference
in Macromolecular and Physical Chemistry
(still in planning stages) http://chemeng.stanford.edu/html/flory_conference.html

MARCH

March 3-8
Microlithography 2002
http://spie.org/Conferences/Calls/02/ml/

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Send any suggestions for events that should be
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