Two New Faculty Members Join the Department in 2006
| The University of Florida is a very dynamic place these days. In
Chemical Engineering, these two new professors join the four new
professors that were hired in 2005. The addition of these six new
professors in the last two years brings the size of our research-active
faculty to 26. Our department is also the 6th largest producer of PhD
chemical engineering graduates in the country (C&E News, July 24, 2006
issue). |
Tanmay Lele's research interests are in the areas of live cell molecular
imaging, cellular engineering, cell-cell and cell-substrate adhesion and cell
motility. Traditional biochemical methods used to study proteins rely on
destroying cells and reconstituting them in dilute solutions. These methods are
poorly suited to study the formation of cell-substrate and cell-cell adhesion
sites or the nuclear transcription machinery which are intricate, labile and
highly dynamic multi-protein complexes. Tanmay Lele's laboratory focuses on
developing new methods to study in-situ protein biochemistry inside living
cells. Tools like high resolution molecular imaging, fluorescence photobleaching,
molecular biology techniques like cloning and RNAi, and traditional chemical
engineering principles based on chemical kinetics and reaction engineering are
employed to measure protein-protein interactions in living cells. Tanmay Lele
completed his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering at the Department of Chemical
Technology, University of Bombay, India in 1998. He completed the Ph.D. degree
in Chemical Engineering at Purdue University in 2002. This was followed with
postdoctoral research at Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Dr.
Donald Ingber's laboratory.
Peng Jiang's research focuses on the development of new chemical, physical,
engineering, and biological applications related to nanostructured materials.
His current research interests include selfassembled photonic crystals,
colloidal plasmonics, nanofluidic bioanalytical systems, ultra-high-density
magnetic and optical recording media, semiconducting polymer devices, and
selfhealing materials. Peng obtained his M.S. degree in Physical Chemistry from
Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1996 studying photoelectron spectroscopy and
molecular simulation. In 2001, he completed his Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry at
Rice University working on colloidal photonic crystals. He was a postdoctoral
fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University from
2003 to 2006 focusing on electrokinetically induced assembly. Besides academic
research, Peng gained industrial R&D experience when he worked at Corning and
GE. His major scientific contributions include the development of a convective
self-assembly technique, which has been widely adopted in making colloidal
photonic crystals, and the invention of a spin-coating technological platform
for the fabrication of a variety of wafer-scale nanostructures. Peng has
published more than 26 papers with over 1300 citations in prominent journals,
such as Science, Physical Review Letters, Journal of the
American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
He has one issued patent and four pending applications.
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Tanmay Lele
Peng Jiang