Meetings, Fall 2009

Matt is currently in charge of scheduling group meeting

We take turns giving the weekly talk at group meeting. The talk focuses on your own research results, or any other subject that you think the group will find interesting. Aim for a 15 minute presentation. It will naturally get longer when interrupted with questions.

By giving regular presentations we practice valuable skills:

• Efficiently conveying a significant amount of information to an audience
• Conveying the reasons you are excited about a topic
• …

Some rules of thumb about giving a good presentation:

• With only 15 minutes, try to teach the audience one new nugget of knowledge (if you are presenting a journal article, the nugget of knowledge is summarized in the title of the article).
• Give your talk a story line. The story includes why the research was done, what was observed, and what it means.
• Prepare some slides with the essential images, cartoon diagrams, data and equations that you want to explain (no more than 4 slides). When you watch department seminars and colloquium think about what makes a good slide.
• Anticipate questions and do background reading to find the answers.

An interesting article about scientific presentations recently appeared in Physics Today pdf.

• Dec 3 - Landon
• Nov 26 - Thanksgiving no meeting
• Nov 19 - Ethan
• Nov 12 - Canan
• Nov 5 - Matt
• Oct 29 - Josh
• Oct 22 - No Speaker
• Oct 15 - Landon “Newest advances in graphene: Suspended devices and nanoribbons from unzipped CNTs (papers 1 & 2)”
• Oct 8 - No speaker
• Oct 1 - Ethan

• Sept 24 - No meeting
• Sept 17 - Canan
• Sept 10 - Matt “Nanotube DNA sensing”
• Aug 6 - Matt “Slide show from China”
• July 31 - Josh “Copper is three times stronger when CNTs are embedded”
• July 24
• July 16 - Landon ”Single electron transistors built from CNTs”
• July 9 - Ethan “The big picture”
• July 2 - Canan “In situ biological imaging using CNT fluorescence”
• Jun 25- Caleb - Solid state project

archive

Check recent blog posts in our research field for discussion ideas.

Low cost and flexible nanopillar-array photovoltaics

Attractive and repulsive forces using light (this is not radiation pressure)

Angela Belcher's group at MIT: Use virus to grow a metal shell, attach to a CNT, then make an electrode for a battery. Published in Science recently.

“Autonomous nanomotors…” W. F. Paxton et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 126, 13424 (2004)