2014 Colloquium Winners

ORAL PRESENTATION AWARDS

BASF Award - $500
Nicholas King (Physics & Astronomy) - “Aluminum for Plasmonics” with M. W. Knight, L. Liu, H. O. Everitt, P. Nordlander, and N. J. Halas

3M Award - $250
Michael McClain (Chemistry) - “Wet Chemical Synthesis of Aluminum Nanocrystals for UV Plasmonics Applications” with E. Ringe, A. E. Schlather, N. S. King, L. Liu, A. Manjavacas, M. W. Knight, I. Kumar, P. Nordlander, K. Whitmire, and N. J. Halas

Advantest Terahertz Innovation Prize - $250
Kimberly Reichel (Applied Physics) - “Directly Probing a Resonant Cavity Inside a Terahertz Parallel-Plate Waveguide” with K. Iwaszczuk, P. U. Jepsen, R. Mendis, and D. M. Mittleman

UNDERGRADUATE POSTER SESSION AWARDS

Kuraray Award - $500
Nicole Moody (NanoJapan) - “Terahertz Spectroscopy of Graphene: Examining the Substrate and Temperature Dependence of Optical Conductivity” with Shinya Kawano, Makoto Ohshiro, Minjie Wang, Iwao Kawayama, Masayoshi Tonouchi, Robert Vajtai, Pulickel M. Ajayan, and Junichiro Kono

3M Award - $250
Rusheel Guduru (RQI REU) - “Carbon Black Nanoparticle Enabled Solar Water Purification” with Tarika Nath, Natanel Neumann, Mengyan Li, Surbhi Lal, Oara Neumann, Peter Nordlander, Pedro Alvarez, and Naomi J. Halas

BASF Award - $250
Benjamin Wang (NanoJapan) - “Direct Growth of Sub-nm-Diameter Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Films on Si/SiO2 Substrates by Alcohol Catalytic Chemical Vapor Deposition” with Hua An, Kehang Cui, and Shigeo Maruyama

National Instruments Award - LabView Student Licenses
- Skylar Deckoff-Jones (NanoJapan) – “Construction and Calibration of Compact Optical Pump Terahertz Probe Spectrometer” with E. L. Wong, Julien Madeo, Bala M. K. Mariserla, and Keshav M. Dani
- Lisa Chiba (NanoJapan) - “Deep Ultraviolet Excitation of Fluorescent Proteins for Multi-Color Imaging” with Yasuaki Kumamoto, Kumiko Uegaki, Atsushi Taguchi, Katsumasa Fujita, and Satoshi Kawata

GRADUATE POSTER SESSION AWARDS

Session A Awards:

Smalley Institute Award - $500
Benjamin Cerjan (Physics & Astronomy) - “Aluminum Antennas for Surface-Enhanced Infrared Absorption” with Lisa Brown, and Naomi J. Halas

PlanarTech - $250
Eteri Svanidze (Applied Physics) - “Non-Fermi Liquid Behavior Close to a Quantum Critical Pointin a Ferromagnetic State without Local Moments” with L. Liu, B. Frandsen, B. D. White, T. Besara, T. Goko, T. Medina, T. J. S. Munsie, G. M. Luke, D. Zheng, C. Q. Jin, T. Siegrist, M. B. Maple, Y. J. Uemura, and E. Morosan

Session B Awards:

Micron Award - $500
Bo Shuang (Chemistry) - “Fast Compressive Sensing for Discrete Single-Molecule FRET Data Analysis” with David Cooper, J. Nick Taylor, Lydia Kisley, Jixin Chen, Wenxiao Wang, Chun Biu Li, Tamiki Komatsuzaki, and Christy F. Landes

IEEE, Houston Section Award - $250
Daniel Murphy (Applied Physics) - “neuroPG: Open Source Software Tool for Optogenetics Research” with Benjamin W. Avants, Joel A. Dapello, Erin Anderson, and Jacob T. Robinson

This year, for the first time, we also had the RQI Choice Awards, which allowed the audience to vote for their favorites in each category. Below are the winners selected by our Colloquium guests.

RQI CHOICE AWARDS

Oral Session
Hossein Robatjazi (Electrical & Computer Engineering) – “Extraordinary Absorption of Sunlight in Nanostructured Monolayer Molybdenum Disulfide” with Shah Mohammad Bahauddin, E. Bianco, C. Doiron, and I. Thomann

Undergraduate Poster
Rachel Brunetti (RQI REU) – “Development of a Super-Resolution Imaging Program to Visualize Porous Hydrogel Structure” with Lydia Kisley, and Christy Landes

Graduate Poster Session A
Amanda Goodman (Chemistry) – “Nanoshell Mediated Light-Triggered Delivery of Lapatinib for Treatment of Brain Metastasis” with Carrie Li, Oara Neumann, Kamilla Nørregaard, Sandra Bishnoi, and Naomi J. Halas

Graduate Poster Session B
Ali Sobhani (Electrical & Computer Engineering) – “Aluminum Single Particles for a Wide Range Plasmonic Resonance in the Visible” with Ali Sobhani, Nick King, Michael McClain, Naomi J. Halas