International Materials Institute to be Established at McCormick

	Bob Chang

A $4 million National Science Foundation International Materials Institute for Solar Energy Conversion

 will be established at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.

The Institute, led by Bob Chang, professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Materials Research Institute, will develop a network of global materials researchers and train young U.S. researchers, as well as inform and educate citizens about solar energy stewardship.

The Institute will form a partnership with Tsinghua University in China in organic/inorganic photovoltaic cells and will also partner with researchers from Louisiana State University and Argonne National Laboratory. In addition to photovoltaic cell research, participating universities will also develop educational content for college, pre-college, and the public including joint undergraduate courses on energy topics and modules for K-12 math and science classes. The Institute will also focus on global leadership development for U.S. graduate students.

"Solar cell research has a large potential impact on sustainable energy usage, the environment, and economic development worldwide," says Chang. "The IMI program will build U.S. capacity in solar energy research by linking U.S. expertise with best international practices, building collaborative partnerships abroad, and preparing the next generation of U.S. researchers to enter the global workforce as leaders."

Smart Memory Foam Made Smarter

	David Dunand

Researchers from Northwestern University and Boise State University have figured out how to produce a less expensive shape-shifting "memory" foam, which could lead to more widespread applications of the material, such as in surgical positioning tools and valve mechanisms.

David Dunand, the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern, has been collaborating with Peter Müllner, professor of materials science and engineering at Boise State, on a project focused on a nickel-manganese-gallium alloy that changes shape when exposed to a magnetic field.

The alloy retains its new shape when the field is turned off but returns to its original shape if the field is rotated 90 degrees, demonstrating "magnetic shape-memory." The alloy can be activated millions of times, and it deforms reliably and reproducibly as a result. This property could be used to advantage in fast-operating actuators (mechanical devices for moving or controlling a mechanism or system) in inkjet printers, car engines and surgical tools.

To date, the magnetic shape-memory effect has occurred only in nickel-manganese-gallium single crystals, which are much more difficult and expensive to create than the more common polycrystals.

Now, Dunand, Müllner and their colleagues have created easily processable polycrystalline foams with shape-changing properties resembling those of the much more expensive single crystals. They did this by introducing small pores into the "nodes" of their original metallic foam, which, much like a sponge, consisted of struts connected by relatively large nodes. Adding a second level of porosity allowed for deformation and retention in the polycrystalline foam of some of the shape-memory properties.

The results are published online by the journal Nature Materials.

"One key aspect of this new 'smart' foam is that, together with a simple coil to produce a magnetic field, it creates a linear actuator of extreme simplicity -- and thus high reliability and miniaturization potential -- replacing a much more complex electro-mechanical system with many moving parts," Dunand said.

Potential applications range from replacing materials currently being used in sonar devices, precision actuators and magneto-mechanical sensors to enabling new devices in biomedicine and microrobotics.

"This was such a huge improvement that the foam was tested over and over again to make sure that no experimental mistakes were made," Müllner said. "Our new results may pave the way for magnetic shape-memory alloys for use in research labs and commercial applications."

Northwestern and Boise State have jointly filed a patent application.

The title of the Nature Materials paper is "Giant Magnetic-field-induced Strains in Polycrystalline Ni Mn Ga Foams." In addition to Dunand and Müllner, other authors of the paper are Xuexi Zhang, a visiting professor in Dunand's lab from China's Harbin Institute of Technology, and Markus Chmielus and Cassie Witherspoon, graduate students at Boise State.

- Megan Fellman

Marks Receives Von Hippel Award from Materials Research Society

	Tobin Marks

Tobin J. Marks, Vladimir N. Ipatieff Research Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, has received the 2009 Von Hippel Award from the Materials Research Society (MRS).

This is the society's highest award, which recognizes "brilliance and originality of intellect, combined with vision extending beyond the boundaries of conventional scientific disciplines." Marks joins Northwestern colleague Julia Weertman, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering, who received the award in 2003.

Marks is a world leader in the fields of organometallic chemistry, chemical catalysis, materials science, organic electronics, photovoltaics and nanotechnology. His citation for the Von Hippel Award reads: "Consistently discovering and applying new scientific principles, Tobin Marks has advanced materials science across a spectrum from self-assembly to crystal growth, encompassing organic electronic, photonic and photovoltaic materials, and oxide dielectrics, conductors and superconductors."

Marks will receive this prestigious award Dec. 2 at the 2009 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. He will deliver a lecture at the ceremony.

During his career, Marks has received numerous awards, including some of the most prestigious national and international awards in the fields of inorganic, catalytic, materials and organometallic chemistry. Recent honors include the 2010 Nichols Medal from the American Chemical Society, the 2009 Nelson W. Taylor Award from the Pennsylvania State University, the 2009 Herman Pines Award from the Chicago Catalysis Society, the 2008 Principe de Asturias Prize for Technical and Scientific Research and the U.S. National Medal of Science. He was named a 2009 Fellow of the Materials Research Society.

Marks has authored 940 articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited six books. He holds 93 U.S. patents. He has served on numerous scientific committees, governmental and industrial advisory boards and review panels and is co-author of several major policy documents. Marks has mentored more than 100 doctoral students and nearly as many postdoctoral fellows, with more than 90 alumni holding academic positions worldwide.

Promise of Nanodiamonds for Safer Gene Therapy

	Dean Ho

Gene therapy holds promise in the treatment of a myriad of diseases, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes, among many others. However, developing a scalable system for delivering genes to cells both efficiently and safely has been challenging.

Now a team of Northwestern University researchers has introduced the power of nanodiamonds as a novel gene delivery technology that combines key properties in one approach: enhanced delivery efficiency along with outstanding biocompatibility.

"Finding a more efficient and biocompatible method for gene delivery than is currently available is a major challenge in medicine," said Dean Ho, who led the research. "By harnessing the innate advantages of nanodiamonds we now have demonstrated their promise for gene therapy."

Ho is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

Ho and his research team engineered surface-modified nanodiamond particles that successfully and efficiently delivered DNA into mammalian cells. The delivery efficiency was 70 times greater than that of a conventional standard for gene delivery. The new hybrid material could impact many facets of nanomedicine.

The results are published online by the journal ACS Nano.

"A low molecular weight polymer called polyethyleneimine-800 (PEI800) currently is a commercial approach for DNA delivery," said Xue-Qing Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in Ho's group and the paper's first author. "It has good biocompatibility but unfortunately is not very efficient at delivery. Forms of high molecular weight PEI have desirable high DNA delivery efficiencies, but they are very toxic to cells."

Multiple barriers confront conventional approaches, making it difficult to integrate both high-efficiency delivery and biocompatibility into one gene delivery system. But the Northwestern researchers were able to do just that by functionalizing the nanodiamond surface with PEI800.

The combination of PEI800 and nanodiamonds produced a 70 times enhancement in delivery efficiency over PEI800 alone, and the biocompatibility of PEI800 was preserved. The process is highly scalable, which holds promise for translational capability.

The researchers used a human cervical cancer cell line called HeLa to test the efficiency of gene delivery using the functionalized nanodiamonds. Glowing green cells confirmed the delivery and insertion into the cells of a "Green Fluorecent Protein (GFP)"-encoding DNA sequence. This served as a demonstrative model of how specific disease-fighting DNA strands could be delivered to cells. As a platform, the nanodiamond system can carry a broad array of DNA strands.

Regarding toxicity measurements, cellular viability assays showed that low doses of the toxic high-molecular PEI resulted in significant cell death, while doses of nanodiamond-PEI800 that were three times higher than that of the high-molecular weight PEI revealed a highly biocompatible complex.

Ho and his research team originally demonstrated the application of nanodiamonds for chemotherapeutic delivery and subsequently discovered that the nanodiamonds also are extremely effective at delivering therapeutic proteins. Their work further has shown that nanodiamonds can sustain delivery while enhancing their specificity as well.

Having demonstrated the safety of nanodiamonds and their applicability toward a variety of biological uses, Ho's team is pursuing aggressively the steps necessary to push them towards clinical relevance. Current studies are boosting the targeting capabilities of the nanodiamonds while also evaluating their pre-clinical efficiency.

"There's a long road ahead before the technology is ready for clinical use," Ho said, "but we are very pleased with the exciting properties and potential of the nanodiamond platform."

The National Science Foundation, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the V Foundation for Cancer Research supported the research.

The title of the ACS Nano paper is "Polymer-Functionalized Nanodiamond Platforms as Vehicles for Gene Delivery." In addition to Ho (senior author) and Zhang, other authors of the paper are Mark Chen, Robert Lam and Xiaoyang Xu, all from Northwestern, and Eiji Osawa, from the NanoCarbon Research Institute at Shinshu University, Nagano, Japan.