For all graduate students, professional students, and postdocs who wish to discuss topics related to inclusion and diversity. Lunch provided.

For all graduate students, professional students, and postdocs who wish to discuss topics related to inclusion and diversity. Lunch provided.

Affiliation: University of Kentucky

Research: https://bio.as.uky.edu/users/bohara

Abstract: Sleep is conserved across all birds and mammals, and perhaps all animals, and yet its primary functions and reason for existence are still unclear.  We still cannot answer the simple question of why we sleep at all.  A major bottleneck in understanding sleep is the time and cost involved with EEG/EMG analysis (the gold standard for sleep in birds and mammals).  Therefore, my lab has spent the past twenty years developing a simple, noninvasive alternative using sensitive piezoelectric films, which has allowed for large scale genomic studies, more efficient drug screens, and the testing of sleep in a wide variety of rodent models for human disease.  Although we do not know the central functions of sleep very well, we now know that it strongly impacts almost all diseases including infections, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzhiemer’s, and essentially every disease examined thus far.  Sufficient sleep is also critical for optimal performance and our sense of well-being.  Even a modest reduction of sleep from 7hrs/night to 5hrs/night reduces the average person’s performance to that of someone who is legally “drunk”.  Sleep traits, like almost all traits, are complex, and the specific alleles of specific genes that influence these traits in people and in mice have been difficult to determine.  However, we and other labs have begun to find patterns and pathways that may shed light on the most critical processes.  Sleep appears to serve many different functions that impact health and disease, a few of which are beginning to be understood, and will be highlighted in this talk.

Abstract: Soft materials are found in a host of application areas, from biotechnology and 3D printing to adhesives and soft devices. However understanding and controlling the behavior of very soft materials is an ongoing challenge. The Soft Materials and Interfaces group focuses on understanding the physics and mechanics of soft polymeric materials, including but not limited to gels, elastomers, and viscoelastic fluids, with an emphasis on responses at or near interfaces. When materials are sufficiently soft or the characteristic size scale is sufficiently small, soft solids display liquid-like characteristics – properties traditionally reserved for liquids emerge as an important part of the material response. In this talk, we introduce situations where combinations of solid and liquid characteristics control the mechanics of deformable interfaces. In particular, we discuss the importance of surface tension, surface stress, and phase separation for the interaction between a small adhesive particle and a soft elastomer. Based on confocal microscopy and colloidal probe experiments, a modified contact mechanics model is proposed. In the second part, we demonstrate tunable adhesive behavior of transient hydrogel networks that are crosslinked with metal-coordination bonds. Time permitting, we will introduce our current knowledge on how a liquid drop interacts with the surface of a soft polymer gel.

Bio: Jonathan Pham is an Assistant Professor of Materials Engineering at the University of Kentucky. He received a PhD in Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he investigated nanoparticle assembly and mechanics. During this time, he was a Chateaubriand fellow at ESPCI-ParisTech investigating deformation of microscale helical filaments in microfluidics. Prior to joining Kentucky, he was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research working on a range of topics, including cell-surface interactions and liquid drop impact.

Research: http://pham.engineering.uky.edu/team/

Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., is Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Associate Professor of History (School of Arts & Sciences) and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Mailman School of Public Health). He writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American history, medical and public health history, urban history, issues of policing and criminal justice, and the history of social movements. His book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (UNC Press, 2009), demonstrates the historical and continuing links between legal and de facto segregation and poor health outcomes. In 2013-14, Dr. Roberts served as the Policy Director of Columbia University’s Justice Initiative, where he coordinated the efforts of several partners to bring attention to the issue of aging and the growing incarcerated elderly population. This work led to the publication of the widely-read landmark report, Aging in Prison Reducing Elder Incarceration and Promoting Public Safety (New York: Columbia University Center for Justice. November 2015).

Dr. Roberts currently is researching a book project on the history of drug addiction policy and politics from the 1950s to the present, a period which encompasses the various heroin epidemics between the 1950s and the 1980s, therapeutic communities, radical recovery movements, methadone maintenance treatment, and harm reduction approaches.

Dr. Roberts tweets from @SamuelKRoberts.