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Josh Carter received B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo in 2002 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry at UC Davis in early 2007. His graduate work studying nanomaterials as they interface with biological systems brought him to Duke to postdoc for Prof. LaBean. Carter's project at Duke focuses on fabricating nanostructures using peptide-directed deposition of inorganic materials on self-assembled DNA templates. He will use DNA lattices to assemble scaffolds for organizing peptides which bind to specific inorganic materials (metals, semiconductors, and dielectrics). DNA/peptide assemblies will organize inorganics at precise locations producing functional nanostructures with interesting electronic and photonic properties. He will be working in Kurt Gothelf and Wael Mamdouh's labs. |
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Elizabeth Irish received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. She is currently a 4th year Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science grad student focusing on nano-optics in the Lazarides lab. In Denmark, she will research small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) on various sized DNA assemblages including 0-dimensional tiles, 1-D nanotracks, and 2-D nanogrid lattices. She will be woking in Jan Skov Pedersen and Wael Mamdouh's labs. |
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Kristine Obusek is a first year grad student in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. She will be working with Elizabeth on the x-ray scattering project in Jan Skov Pedersen and Wael Mamdouh's labs. |
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Patrick Videau is a Goucher College student with a Biological Sciences major, a Molecular Biology concentration, and a Chemistry minor. Patrick's project focuses on binding chitin nanoparticles to DNA lattice endowed with a chitin aptamer domain. He will be working in Jørgen Kjems and Wael Mamdouh's labs. |
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Andy Smith is a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics concentrating in Biology. He will be studying the thermal stability of DNA nanostructures under a variety of solution conditions. He will be working in Kurt Gothelf, Jørgen Kjems, and Wael Mamdouh's labs. |
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Thomas Henry LaBean (1963) earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993. He studied the folding properties of arbitrary sequence proteins expressed by random, synthetic DNA libraries under the guidance of Professor Stuart A. Kauffman and Professor Tauseef R. Butt. He then moved to Duke University and studied protein design with Professors Jane S. and David C. Richardson, and then worked on DNA-based computation with Professor John H. Reif. He now studies self-assembling biomolecular nanostructures as an Associate Research Professor at Duke University. Dr. LaBean is the P.I. of the NSF-IRES grant and is the group's intrepid research commander in Denmark. |
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Kurt Vesterager Gothelf (1968) performed his PhD research in organic synthesis and asymmetric catalysis at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1995 under the guidance of Professor K. B. G. Torssell and Professor K. A. Jørgensen. Following a period as a postdoc in Professor K. A. Jørgensen’s group, he joined Professor M. C. Pirrung’s group at Duke University. He returned to Aarhus University in 1999 to initiate research in organic nanochemistry. Since May 2002 he has been an Associate Professor at Aarhus University. |