MSE Seminar Series

Friday, March 12, 2021 @11:40am
*Remote course - Zoom link will be provided

Dr. Petra Rudolf, Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen

presents

Lego With Layered Structures: Pillared Clay and Graphene Oxide

ABSTRACT:
Over the past decade clay and graphene oxide have given enormous impetus to using layered materials as functional materials, leading to novel methods on how to exfoliate the bulk material into one- or few-atom thick sheets, to intercalate it with atoms and (macro)molecules, and to construct hybrids in a layer-by-layer fashion. Many insights have been gained on the laminar structure of these hybrids and on their peculiar properties. In this presentation I shall illustrate different ways to build pillared clay and graphene oxide with various pillaring agents as to obtain nanopores of the right size and chemical affinity for applications in gas storage, catalysis, drug delivery and environmental remediation.

BIOGRAPHY:
Petra Rudolf was born in Munich, Germany. She studied Physics at the La Sapienza University of Rome, where she specialized in Solid State Physics. In 1987 she joined the National Surface Science laboratory TASC INFM in Trieste for the following five years, interrupted by two extended periods in 1989 and 1990/1991 at Bell Labs in the USA, where she started to work on the newly discovered fullerenes. In 1993 she joined the University of Namur, Belgium, where she received her PhD in 1995 and then quickly moved from postdoctoral researcher to lecturer and senior lecturer before taking up the Chair in Experimental Solid State Physics at the University in Groningen in the Netherlands in 2003. Her principal research interests lie in the areas of condensed matter physics and surface science, particularly molecular motors, graphene, organic thin films and inorganic-organic hybrids.She has published >250 peer-reviewed articles and 32 book chapters, and given about 200 invited talks at international / national conferences and research institutions. Dr. Rudolf currently serves as President of the European Physical Society and was elected member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (2016), corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, Fellow of the Institute of Physics (2001), honorary member of the Dutch (2006) and the Italian Physical Society (2018) and Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. For her work on molecular motors she received the 2007 Descartes Prize of the European Commission. In 2013 she was appointed Officer of the Order of Orange Nassau by H.M. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.