The 22^nd annual MIT-Princeton Microsymposium on Polymers will be held in MIT on June 10 and June 11 2015. Graduate students and postdocs from the Cohen-Rubner group at MIT and the Register group at Princeton will present a number of talks in Room 66-360. The list of presenters can be found here.

Professor Cohen has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a learned society and policy research center that dates back to its founding in 1780. The Fellows of the academy are drawn from a wide variety professional activities including mathematics, physical and biological sciences, social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs and the arts. More information can be found at American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The Cohen group is happy to welcome Dr. Kenan Song as a new post-doc in the group. His research focus will be on fabricating and examining the mechanical properties of different polymer coatings generated by Layer-by-Layer deposition.

The Cohen group is pleased to welcome Prof. Khalid Askar who will be collaborating with the Cohen-Rubner groups for 2 years on developing a high performance multifunctional coating for desert based solar cells.

Congrats to recent graduates Dr. Hyomin Lee, Dr. Jonathan Gilbert and Dr. Siddarth Srinivasan for successfully defending their PhD thesis!

The Cohengroup was well represented at the conference on Layer-by-Layer Assembly that was held on June 23 & 25 at Stevens Institute in Hoboken NJ. The conference was organized by Cohen’s close collaborator Professor Michael Rubner of ™the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering and longtime friend of the Cohengroup, Svetlana Sukhishvili of Stevens Institute. Our groups contributions to the conference technical program were a lecture presented by Cohen that summarized Hyomin Lee’s recently-completed PhD thesis research on H-bonded LbL Films and a lecture by postdoc Roberta Polak on mucin-based release layers. A highlight of the conference was the dinner cruise around Manhattan. Photo below shows Rubner and Cohen with other conference attendees (far left) David Lynn from Wisconsin and (center) Catherine Picard from Grenoble France. Roberta Polak appears at the right admiring the New York skyline.

Congratulations to Jonathan Gilbert for winning a 2013 Graduate Student Speaker Award at the Materials Research Society meeting in Boston. His work on "Orientation-Specific Attachment of Polymeric Microtubes on Cell Surfaces" was presented during Symposium I: Multiscale Materials in the Study and Treatment of Cancer.

Graduate student Rosanna Lim won first place in the materials engineering and sciences poster session at the annual AIChE conference in San Francisco. She presented on the "Covalent Attachment of Polyelectrolyte Multilayers to Cells."

Jonathan Gilbert's work on fabricating tubular particles presenting heterogeneous regions of chemistry to control the particle orientation on the surface of live lymphocytes was recently featured in Nature News & Views. Controlling the orientation of anisotropic microparticles on cell surfaces is of interest for biomedical applications such as bottom up tissue engineering and drug delivery since it can be used to promote or resist particle internalization.

Congratulations to Hyomin Lee for winning the '2013 Global Top Talent Forum Award for Outstanding Presentation' from Hyundai motors

The Boston-based Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation considers proposals on an annual basis to support participation of New England college professors in international scholarly activities of various types. Professor Cohen's 2013 proposal to the foundation was one of 36 selected for funding from the pool of 118 proposals considered. He will participate in a workshop on 'Fog and Dew Harvesting: Theory and Practice' that he and Dr. Daniel Beysens will host at ESPCI Paris Tech on Monday September 30. The workshop agenda is available for download.

Work on fog harvesting led by group members Kyoo-Chul Park (PhD '13) and Shreerang Chhatre (PhD '13) was featured on MIT news. The reasearch findings are available online in the journal Langmuir.

The Cohen group enjoyed a summer group outing along the beach at Spectacle Island in the Boston Harbor. It was the perfect sunny day for having a picnic, walking around the island, and even jumping into the water.

Siddarth Srinivasan's work on "Drag reduction for viscous laminar flow on spray-coated non-wetting surfaces" is featured on the cover of the June 28 issue of Soft Matter.

The 20^th annual MIT-Princeton Microsymposium on Polymers will be held in MIT on June 12 and June 13 2013. Graduate students and postdocs from the Cohen group at MIT and the Register group at Princeton will present a number of talks in Room 66-360. The list of presenters can be found here.

Jonathan Gilbert's work on 'Depth-profiling X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis of interlayer diffusion in polyelectrolyte multilayers ' has been published in PNAS.

PhDCEP graduate student, Rosanna Lim, has been awarded the Chyn Duog Shiah Memorial Fellowship for 2013-2014, which is a fellowship offered by the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education. This fellowship supports a graduate student of Chinese ancestry, with a preference to chemical engineering students.

Cohen and Rubner to be honored at 2013 Spring ACS Meeting in New Orleans: Longtime research collaborators Robert Cohen and Michael Rubner will be inducted as Fellows of two separate divisions of the American Chemical Society at a joint award ceremony to be held on Wednesday April 10. Cohen will be inducted as a Fellow of the Division of Polymer Chemistry, and Rubner will become a Fellow of the Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering. These large and active divisions of ACS select Fellows from their memberships each year. Cohen will join 5 others in this year's class of POLY Fellows and Rubner will be among a group of 8 PMSE Fellows. Last year at the Spring 2012 ACS meeting Cohen received the Paul J Flory Polymer Education Award from the POLY Division.

Hyomin Lee's work on 'Zwitter-Wettability and Antifogging Coatings with Frost-Resisting Capabilities' has been featured on MIT news.

Graduate student Jonathan Gilbert presented a talk on "Methods of polymeric backpacks attachment for cell-mediated drug delivery" in the 244th ACS National Meeting & Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the Abiotic/Biotic Interfaces session (Thursday, August 23 at 2:00 PM).

The 19^th annual MIT-Princeton Microsymposium on Polymers will be held in Princeton on June 14, 2012. Graduate students and postdocs from the Cohen group at MIT and the Register group at Princeton will present a number of talks.. The list of presenters can be found here.

Graduate student Siddharth Srinivasan was one of the recipents of the 2012 Peebles Award for his work on the 'Perturbation Analysis of Accuracy of Contact Angle Determination for Sessile Drops on Liquid Repellent Surfaces'. He was also was the runner-up for the 2012 Alan Gent Award for the Most Distinguished Student Paper.

The following group members will present talks at the 86^th ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium at June 10-13, 2012 at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

• Mon, Jun 11, 9:50 - 10:10 AM
  Non-wetting surfaces and estimation of slip lengths
  S. Srinivasan, R. E. Cohen, G. H. McKinley;
• Wed, Jun 13, 1:50 - 2:10 PM
  Utilizing dynamic contact angle tensiometry to quantify the kinetics of switchable surface rearrangement
  J. A. Kleingartner, H. Lee, G. H. McKinley, R. E. Cohen
• Wed, Jun 13, 3:40 - 4:00 PM
  Water-harvesting mesh surfaces
  K. Park, S. S. Chhatre, A. Deng, R. E. Cohen, G. H. McKinley

Prof. Cohen has been awarded the prestigious Paul J. Flory Polymer Education Award for 2012. This award is presented biennially in recognition of outstanding achievements in promoting undergraduate and/or graduate polymer education. An award symposium in honor of Prof. Cohen involving a number of distinguished invited speakers will be held during the Spring ACS National Meeting in San Diego at 8:00 AM on Wednesday, March 28, 2012.