Join us May 3rd, at 11am for the next speaker in our Converge to Transform: Interdisciplinary STEM Seminar Series as we hear from Dr. Odom in talk titled:
Shape Effects and Designer Nanoconstructs for Nanomedicine
Abstract- Nanotechnology offers unique strategies for minimally invasive and localized approaches to diagnose and treat diseases. For example, nanoparticles have been explored in a range of applications, including as drug delivery vehicles, imaging probes, and therapeutic agents. Although increased therapeutic efficacy has been realized, direct visualization of how engineered nanoparticles interact with specific organelles or cellular components has been limited. Such interactions will have implications for fundamentals in cancer biology as well as in the design of translational therapeutic agents. This talk will describe how drug-loaded gold nanostars can behave as optical probes to interrogate how therapeutic nanoconstructs interact with cells at the nanoscale. We will focus on model cancer cell systems that can be used to visualize how gold nanoconstructs target cells, rotate, and translate on the plasma membrane, are endocytosed, and are trafficked intracellularly. Critically, differences in translational and rotational motion between spherical and star-shaped nanoconstructs indicate that the nanoparticle scaffold geometry affects how targeting ligands present and bind to cell-membrane receptors. That nanoparticle shape can preserve ligand activity of nanoconstructs in vitro will have important implications for engineering designer nanoconstructs for nanomedicine.
Biography- Teri W. Odom is Joan Husting Madden and William H. Madden, Jr. Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Chemistry Department at Northwestern University. She is an expert in designing structured nanoscale materials that exhibit extraordinary size and shape-dependent optical and physical properties. Odom has pioneered a suite of multi-scale nanofabrication tools that have resulted in plasmon-based nanoscale lasers that exhibit tunable color, flat optics that can manipulate light at the nanoscale, and hierarchical substrates that show controlled wetting and super-hydrophobicity. She has also invented a class of biological nanoconstructs that are facilitating unique insight into nanoparticle-cell interactions and that show superior imaging and therapeutic properties because of their gold nanostar shape.
Odom is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS), the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIBME), the American Physical Society (APS), and Optica [formerly the Optical Society of America (OSA)]. Select honors and awards include: the RSC Centenary Prize; the ACS National Award in Surface Science; a Research Corporation TREE Award; a U.S. Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship; a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard University; an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award; the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award; the National Fresenius Award from Phi Lambda Upsilon and the ACS; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.
Odom was founding Chair of the Noble Metal Nanoparticles Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and founding Vice-Chair of the GRC on Lasers in Micro, Nano, Bio Systems. She was an inaugural Associate Editor for Chemical Science and founding Executive Editor of ACS Photonics. Currently, Odom is Editor-in-Chief of Nano Letters.
This one-hour seminar will take place in the ASRC auditorium, and broadcast via Zoom. All registrants will receive instructions to obtain a Cleared4 Pass to enter the building.
For further questions about this hybrid event, please contact:
Shelby Truitt
struitt@gc.cuny.edu