Speaker: Prof. Alfredo Alexander-Katz Merton C. Flemings Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Date: Wednesday, February 28th, 2011 Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm (pizza and refreshments will be served at 11:40am ) Location: The Chipman Room (6-104)

Many processes in nature depend crucially on the interplay of fluid flows and their interactions with soft-materials. In some instances, for example, our body uses mechanically responsive macromolecules that sense particular conditions and respond appropriately, many times by altering their conformations. On the other hand, many important transport mechanisms within out body depend on active soft appendices that can create flows or molecular motors that change their conformations to transport cargo within the cell. In this talk we will present our work on two systems that correspond to each of these cases. In particular, we will consider the problem of blood clotting at elevated flowing conditions where the conformational dynamics of a large biopolymer plays a crucial role during the clotting cascade. Furthermore, we will show what are the determining properties that enable the plugging process to occur. On the other side, we will present our work on driving flows through conformational changes in self-assembled magnetic bead chains. These active chains behave as microscopic walkers that induce controlled flows at the microscale and mimic the motion of molecular motors. To finalize we will present a perspective on the future of both of these intimately related topics and their technological relevance in fields ranging from drug-delivery to virtual microfluidics.

Speaker: Prof. Krystyn Van Vliet Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Date: Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm (pizza and refreshments will be served at 11:40am ) Location: The Chipman Room (6-104)

TBA