Musfeldt Elected as NHMFL User Committee Chair
Dr. Janice Musfeldt, Professor of Chemistry, was elected Chair of the Users Committee of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, effective January 2011.
Established by the National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement, the NHMFL’s Users Committee represents the laboratory’s broad multidisciplinary user community and advises the lab’s leadership on all issues affecting users of the facilities.
Musfeldt joined the faculty in 2001. Since then, she has made many contributions to the field of spectroscopy of materials under extreme conditions. She is particularly well known for forwarding high magnetic field spectroscopies of complex solids, although she is also interested in low temperature, high pressure, small size, and frustration effects in functional materials. Her scientific work is extensively cited, and she is in great demand as an invited speaker. Musfeldt serves the materials community via extensive conference, school, and workshop organization.
Peng (Jacky) Chen, a graduate student in Dr. Janice Musfeldt’s research group has one paper accepted in Nano Letters, an ACS publication reporting on fundamental research in all branches of the theory and practice of nanoscience and nanotechnology.
The Camden group attended the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy held at Boston, MA from August 8 to 13. During the conference, Dr. Camden presented a talk on Wavelength Scanned Surface Enhanced Hyper Raman Spectroscopy. Chris Bennett and Vighter Iberi both presented posters at the student poster session.
The goal of Vighter, Camden and Guiton’s project is to correlate the optical measurements of nanostructures generated by the surface plasmons using Resonant Rayleigh Scattering, with high resolution structural information obtained by using Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM). This technique will also reveal the different localized surface plasmon modes in the nanostructure as well as the relationship between the optical surface plasmons and the plasmons generated from the inelastic scattering of the electron beam. The measurement of the surface plasmon excitations in a STEM is called Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS)(abstract provided by Vighter, picture on the right).
Dean of the College of Arts and Science Bruce Bursten has been named to the American Chemical Society (ACS) fellows program. The program began in 2009 to recognize and honor ACS members for their outstanding achievements in and contributions to the science, the profession, and service to the society. Bursten, who was president of ACS in 2008, conducts research in inorganic chemistry, focusing on the correlation of theoretical and experimental electronic structural data with the bonding and reactivity patterns of metal-containing molecules. The 192 new ACS Fellows will be honored at the society’s fall national meeting in Boston later this month. Additional information about the program is available at 
Michael Best, an assistant professor of organic chemistry, recently received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The award includes a 5-year, $580,000 grant to support his laboratory research on the molecular mechanisms by which proteins bind to lipids presented on the surfaces of cellular membranes. Such events control many biological processes and are aberrant in numerous disease states, including cancer. Better understanding of these interactions and the defects associated with them is important to determining the underlying causes of diseases.
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