Five Questions With: Robert Hurt

Robert Hurt is an engineering professor at Brown University and the director of the university’s Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation, which just celebrated its five-year anniversary.

Hurt talked to Providence Business News about the institute’s growth during that period, its research, and the future of the nanoscience industry in the Ocean State.

PBN: As director of the Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation at Brown, how has this program grown in the five years since its inception?

HURT: Our Institute, IMNI, was founded in 2007 to promote and coordinate research and education in the molecular and nanosciences across the Brown campus.

Over the last five years we have worked hard to develop cross-departmental and cross-institutional research teams that allow our scientist to address the big societal problems of the day – those that are too complex for traditional single-investigator science.

We have also recruited and hired several new young faculty members, developed a professional staff for proposal development and program management, increased the number and breadth of our federal grant portfolio in this area, acquired new major pieces of research equipment, and launched the Rhode Island Consortium for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (RIN2) together with partners from URI.

PBN: Of all the research being conducted at IMNI, what’s your favorite and why?

HURT: It’s a hard choice - with 60 members and three thrust areas, we have a lot of exciting research to talk about. Certainly Professor Shouheng Sun’s research on nanoparticle synthesis is internationally recognized, and his highly engineered nanoparticles are promising for applications in sensing, data storage, fuel cell electrodes, biomedicine, and as catalysts for energy transformation processes.

Another highlight is our new federally-sponsored Center for Chemical Innovation, led by Professor Tayhas Palmore. The grant focuses on conversion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into commodity chemicals, in the hope of developing more sustainable routes to chemical manufacturing.

I am also very excited by our industry partnerships with General Motors and Medtronic, both focused on advanced materials.

PBN: IMNI recently earned permission from the university to open a NanoTools facility on campus, what does that entail?

HURT: One of IMNI’s most important functions has been to build and operate central facilities that offer state-of-the-art equipment to users both on and off campus. Much of the equipment needed for modern R&D in nanotechnology and materials science is too expensive to be acquired and run by individual investigators or laboratories. IMNI currently operates central facilities for micro-fabrication and electron microscopy, the latter facility being one of the finest university facilities anywhere.

A while back we recognized the need for a new facility that focuses on material characterization. Having fabricated a new material or device, one needs to know a lot about its structure and properties before it can be effectively pushed into new technologies. Our new NanoTools facility, which is on the planning board, will house a suite of state-of-the-art instruments for materials characterization, including spectroscopies to study the chemical bonding within a material, and atomic force microscopes to study the atomic-scale and nanoscale features on material surfaces.

PBN: The science of nanotechnology has really burst onto the scene in the last 20 years, how do you think the field will continue to grow, both at IMNI and nationally?

HURT: Nanotechnology has grown steadily over the last decade both in terms of federal funding and in terms of IP generation and product commercialization. This growth is projected to continue. At the same time, nanotechnology has matured and evolved as a field, and become less of a stand-alone activity and more integrated into technology development across a range of sectors.

I believe that most nanotechnology today is not being practiced at self-identified nanotech startups, but at large firms in many different sectors of manufacturing. Much of the R&D you might associate with energy technology, for example, whether in batteries, solar cells, or fuel cells, is really nanotechnology applied to the materials and components used in those devices. That is where much of the real innovation is occurring.

Ten years ago, nanotechnology was exploratory science taking place in university laboratory settings, and sometimes described in very imaginative and futuristic terms. Now it is evolving into a set of practical mainstream tools and materials used in technology development for energy, health care, military, and manufacturing. I believe we will see continued growth, but that growth might not always be in the form of an easily definable nanotech business sector.

PBN: You’ve said that you think nanotechnology can help Brown (and the state’s other higher education facilities) boost Rhode Island’s economy. How?

HURT: IMNI’s growth has created faculty and staff jobs, as mentioned above. I think our biggest opportunity for the future is still in the area of federal funding, where IMNI and RIN2 can bring together a critical mass of researchers to compete for large grants.

This basic research employs people in the state, and also attracts some of the top young talent to pursue higher degrees and maybe remain in the state or region after graduation. I also hope we can grow our industrial partner program and focus it more on state and regional companies.

Finally, with the establishment of the new School of Engineering, which is a major player in IMNI, and with Brown’s development and growth in the Jewelry District, there is hope we can develop a critical mass of high-technology activity in Providence that could help the knowledge economy here take shape.

By Emily Greenhalgh

How silver turns people blue

Ingesting silver — in antimicrobial health tonics or for extensive medical treatments involving silver — can cause argyria, condition in which the skin turns grayish-blue. Brown researchers have discovered how that happens.  The process is similar to developing black-and-white photographs, and it's not just the silver.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University have shown for the first time how ingesting too much silver can cause argyria, a rare condition in which patients’ skin turns a striking shade of grayish blue.

“It’s the first conceptual model giving the whole picture of how one develops this condition,” said Robert Hurt, professor of engineering at Brown and part of the research team. “What’s interesting here is that the particles someone ingests aren’t the particles that ultimately cause the disorder.”

Scientists have known for years argyria had something to do with silver. The condition has been documented in people who (ill advisedly) drink antimicrobial health tonics containing silver nanoparticles and in people who have had extensive medical treatments involving silver. Tissue samples from patients showed silver particles actually lodged deep in the skin, but it wasn’t clear how they got there.

As it turns out, argyria is caused by a complex series of chemical reactions, Hurt said. His paper on the subject, authored with Brown colleagues Jingyu Liu, Zhongying Wang, Frances Liu, and Agnes Kane, is published in the journal ACS Nano.

Robert Hurt

"The particles someone ingests 

aren't the particals that ultimately 

cause the disorders"

Hurt and his team show that nanosilver is broken down in the stomach, absorbed into the bloodstream as a salt and finally deposited in the skin, where exposure to light turns the salt back into elemental silver and creates the telltale bluish hue. That final stage, oddly, involves the same photochemical reaction used to develop black-and-white photographs.

From silver to salt and back again

Hurt and his team have been studying the environmental impact of silver, specifically silver nanoparticles, for years. They’ve found that nanosilver tends to corrode in acidic environments, giving off charged ions — silver salts — that can be toxic in large amounts. Hurt’s graduate student, Jingyu Liu (now a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology), thought those same toxic ions might also be produced when silver enters the body, and could play a role in argyria.

To find out, the researchers mixed a series chemical treatments that could simulate what might happen to silver inside the body. One treatment simulated the acidic environment in the gastrointestinal tract; one mimicked the protein content of the bloodstream; and a collagen gel replicated the base membranes of the skin.

They found that nanosilver corrodes in stomach acid in much the same way it does in other acidic environments. Corrosion strips silver atoms of electrons, forming positively charged silver salt ions. Those ions can easily be taken into the bloodstream through channels that absorb other types of salt. That’s a crucial step, Hurt said. Silver metal particles themselves aren’t terribly likely to make it from the GI tract to the blood, but when they’re transformed into a salt, they’re ushered right through.

From there, Hurt and his team showed that silver ions bind easily with sulfur present in blood proteins, which would give them a free ride through the bloodstream. Some of those ions would eventually end up in the skin, where they’d be exposed to light.

To re-create this end stage, the researchers shined ultraviolet light on collagen gel containing silver ions. The light caused electrons from the surrounding materials to jump onto the unstable ions, returning them to their original state — elemental silver. This final reaction is ultimately what turns patients’ skin blue. The photoreaction is similar to the way silver is used in black and white photography. When exposed to light, silver salts on a photographic film reduce to elemental silver and darken, creating an image.

Implications for nanosilver

Despite its potential toxicity, silver has been valued for centuries for its ability to kill germs, which is why silver nanoparticles are used today in everything from food packaging to bandages. There are concerns however that this nanoparticle form of silver might pose a unique health threat all its own.

This research, however, “would be one piece of evidence that you could treat nanoparticles in the same way as other forms of silver,” Hurt says.

That’s because the bioavailable form of silver — the form that is absorbed into the bloodstream — is the silver salt that’s made in the stomach. Any elemental silver that’s ingested is just the raw material to make that bioavailable salt. So ingesting silver in any form, be it nano or not, would have basically the same effect, Hurt said.

“The concern in this case is the total dose of silver, not what form it’s in,” Hurt said. “This study implies that silver nanoparticles will be less toxic than an equivalent amount of silver salt, at least in this exposure scenario.”

The National Science Foundation and the Superfund Research Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funded the research.

Fei Guo Ph.D. ’12 Receives Brian Kelly Award

Brown University School of Engineering postdoctoral researcher Fei Guo Ph.D. ’12 was presented the Brian Kelly Award at Carbon 2012, the annual world conference on carbon in Krakow, Poland, on June 21. Guo, who was advised by Professor Bob Hurt at Brown, delivered a 30-minute award lecture, “Graphene-Based Environmental Barriers,” to the conference participants.

In his presentation, Guo demonstrated the potential for graphene oxide films to act as high-performance barriers for environmental toxicants. Applying elemental mercury (considered a neurotoxic) as a model, he showed that just 20 nm graphene oxide films, which were deposited onto surface treated polymers, reduced mercury permeability by 90%.

This prestigious annual award was established in 1996 by the British Carbon Group in memory of Brian Kelly, a leading authority on the physics of graphite to reward excellence in carbon science and technology. The award is currently five hundred pounds sterling (£500) and was presented at the time of the conference with a certificate. The award is intended as a travel grant for students and early career researchers with up to ten years postdoctoral experience to attend the annual World Carbon Conference.

Small Wonder

Partnering with an engineer, a pathologist goes in a new direction.

The yellow-and-black signs outside Dr. Agnes Kane’s pathology laboratory read “CAUTION: Cancer hazard.” Nodding at the ominous-looking postings, Kane explains, “because of their toxicity similar to asbestos, we handle these materials as if they were carcinogens.” Meanwhile, across the Providence River, at the School of Engineering, Professor Robert Hurt is hard at work creating the very materials that Kane is so gingerly studying: nanoparticles.

Smaller than 1,000th the width of a human hair—so small that you need an electron microscope to see them— nanoparticles’ practical applications may be enormous: making implants more biocompatible; diagnosing and treating cancers; cleaning up oil spills. That said, the history of science is filled with promising solutions that create additional unforeseen problems of their own. No one is more aware of this than Kane, chair of Brown’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. She has spent her career on, and helped guide the Department’s focus on, the human health effects of environmental and occupational exposures. She and Hurt tick off some examples demonstrating this law of unintended consequences:

“Corn ethanol,” says Hurt, referring to the fact that 40 percent of the corn grown in America is used to create this alternative fuel. “Then you raise the corn prices for food.”

Kane nods. “Use more fertilizer? Contaminate our water supplies. There’s always these trade-offs.”

One of modern history’s most devastating trade-offs was of a common mineral that makes an excellent flameretardant building material. Its usefulness notwithstanding, asbestos can cause devastating cancers and fatal lung problems both for those who mine it and for those who live and work in buildings that contain it.

Small, Novel...but Safe

Selenium-carbon nanocomposite particles
synthesized as a novel chemotherapy agent

From the time Kane joined Brown’s pathology department as a founding member in 1982, she has studied the mechanisms by which asbestos injures cells and causes cancer. When, in 2004, she gave a talk about this research to a group of colleagues, Hurt approached her afterward. The asbestos fibers that Kane showed in her talk reminded Hurt of the carbon nanofibers he had been developing. “We were not working on health effects at the time,” Hurt says. “We were doing traditional nanoscience, trying to make new things that had never been made before.”

But when Hurt told Kane about his carbon nanofibers, “I immediately asked him if I could have some,” Kane recalls. Her worrisome discovery—that the particles were similar to asbestos in several key ways—has changed the direction of both her own and Hurt’s careers and of the pathology department’s research and teaching.

Now Kane and Hunt work side-by-side to create innovative nanotechnology and, simultaneously, assess the materials’ safety and toxicity. “It’s a new paradigm to try to consider the implications of the technology as you develop the technology,” says Hurt. “We haven’t done a lot of that in the past. We just develop technology and we field it and then we worry about what its implications might be. So it’s kind of fun to do these things together.”

In 2007, their collaboration gave rise to the Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation (IMNI), an interdisciplinary organization comprising more than 60 faculty in nine departments. Kane heads IMNI’s NanoHealth Initiative, which studies the environmental and health effects of nanotechnology.

Training the Next Interdisciplinarians

With curly chin-length gray hair and blue eyes, Kane—known to friends and colleagues as “Aggie”—smiles often and laughs readily. Her unassuming manner and commitment to collaboration, teaching, and mentorship have won her numerous teaching awards and devotees.

“If it weren’t for Aggie, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing,” says Luba Dumenco, a lecturer in pathology and director of the Medical School’s preclinical curriculum. “She’s always valued teaching incredibly highly.” Just recently, Dumenco struck up a conversation with another mom at the local skating rink.The woman happened to be a neonatologist who had trained at Brown’s medical school. “I told her I was teaching at the med school, and she said, ‘Do you know Dr. Aggie Kane? She was our favorite! We loved her!’” Dumenco says with a laugh. “She cares a lot about the students.She does a wonderful job and they’re very lucky to have her.”

The breadth of students that Kane reaches each year has grown as a result of her partnership with Hurt. In 2009, they secured a grant from GAANN, or Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need, to fund interdisciplinary training in nanotechnology. Between six and eight doctoral students study nanotoxicology and nanomedicine with co-mentors in engineering or physical sciences and biological science. Kane and Hurt also co-teach an undergraduate and graduate course called “Small Wonders: Science, Technology, and Human Health Impacts of Nanomaterials.” For their final projects, students working together in interdisciplinary teams are required both to use nanotechnology to solve some real-world problem and to address—and minimize—their solution’s potential environmental and health impacts. “I look at this as training the next generation of environmental scientists and engineers,” Kane says.

But first they have to learn how to talk to each other. When Kane and Hurt began collaborating, “it took us a while to learn each other’s languages,” says Kane, “because medicine has its own vocabulary, as well as engineering.” Kane might, for example, say “mitochondria,” or “epigenetics,” and get a blank stare in return. “And so we would just keep asking each other questions, any time we didn’t understand something,” she recalls. “It took us quite some time to learn enough to communicate effectively.”

Their newest collaboration is funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, which was established in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Hurt has set out to design nanoparticles called nanosorbents, which by capturing and sequestering pollutants like oil, may be safer and more effective than existing methods of cleaning up oil spills. The Deepwater Horizon cleanup team—like the Exxon Valdez team before it—relied on Corexit, a dispersant which causes oil to suspend in the water as tiny particles rather than accumulate on the surface as oil slicks.

“They used it in enormous amounts in the Deepwater Horizon cleanup,” says Hurt, but “it’s not clear if it’s a good idea to use very large amounts of chemicals in a marine environment.”

But it’s not clear whether nanosorbents are a good idea, either. As Hurt designs the particles, Kane and her team set out to answer two questions. “First, will they work?” she asks. “And then, will they be toxic to the organisms?”

“They might be worse,” Hurt acknowledges. “We don’t know.”

Engineering Prevention

To begin to answer these questions, Kane has a small steel tank in her lab. Like a miniature wave pool, the open-air tank bubbles with seawater maintained at exactly 72 degrees. Soon this will be home to a small colony of brine shrimp, tiny marine organisms that, as larvae in the wild, are eaten by small fish, which, in turn, are used as bait to catch larger fish, which are eaten by people. As such, the brine shrimp are a good “indicator species” for study.

“We don’t want to have these kinds of dispersants accumulate up the food chain,” says Kane, peeking at the churning water.

A tube runs from a beaker into the basin, helping to aerate the water. As the shrimp grow in the lab, Kane and her colleagues will release oil and Hurt’s nanoparticles into the water with them to see what happens. Will they stop swimming? Will they die? Will their RNA reflect toxicity or injury? If so, Kane says, she is confident that her colleagues can alter the nanoparticles to reflect her findings.

“Engineers are very clever,” she says with a smile. “If we can identify the specific properties that are associated with the toxic effects, they can design [the nanoparticles] or process them to eliminate those properties or reduce those properties and reduce their toxicity.” And part of the excitement of studying nanoparticles is the ability to intervene now, in the very early stages—to prevent environmental and health disasters, rather than clean them up after the fact.

“When you think about what happened with the widespread use of asbestos throughout the 20th century— and we’re still suffering the consequences because of the long latent period of those diseases—the fact that those fibers persist in the buildings and in the environment and we’re still being exposed,” says Kane, “that’s a very expensive lesson. We do not want to repeat that tragedy again.”

by Beth Schwartzapfel ’01
Photographs by Karen Philippi
Courtesy of Brown Medicine Magazine

Simple method could aid in medical imaging, chemotherapy

Researchers, led by Robert Hurt, professor of engineering, have found that a simple technique can swathe nanoparticles with a blanket of graphene, which could carry medical imaging contrast agents, allowing the nanoparticles to enhance imaging signals while shielding tissue from their potential toxic effects. They could also deliver chemotherapy drugs to tumors.

Full report online: cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/04/Graphene-Envelops-Nanoparticles.html

Full paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nl2045952

Nickel nanoparticles may contribute to lung cancer

Lab experiments find that nickel particles with diameters billionths of a meter wide can trigger a cellular pathway that promotes cancer growth.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — All the excitement about nanotechnology comes down to this: Structures of materials at the scale of billionths of a meter take on unusual properties. Technologists often focus on the happier among these newfound capabilities, but new research by an interdisciplinary team of scientists at Brown University finds that nanoparticles of nickel activate a cellular pathway that contributes to cancer in human lung cells.

When human lung epithelial cells are exposed to equivalent doses of nano-sized (left) or micro-sized (right) metallic nickel particles, activated HIF-1 alpha pathways (stained green) appear mostly with the nanoparticles.

“Nanotechnology has tremendous potential and promise for many applications,” said Agnes Kane, chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “But the lesson is that we have to learn to be able to design them more intelligently and, if we recognize the potential hazards, to take adequate precautions.”

Kane is the senior author of the study published in advance online this month in the journal Toxicological Sciences.

Nickel nanoparticles had already been shown to be harmful, but not in terms of cancer. Kane and her team of pathologists, engineers and chemists found evidence that ions on the surface of the particles are released inside human epithelial lung cells to jumpstart a pathway called HIF-1 alpha. Normally the pathway helps trigger genes that support a cell in times of low oxygen supply, a problem called hypoxia, but it is also known to encourage tumor cell growth.

“Nickel exploits this pathway, in that it tricks the cell into thinking there’s hypoxia but it’s really a nickel ion that activates this pathway,” said Kane, whose work is supported by a National Institues of Health Superfund Research Program Grant. “By activating this pathway it may give premalignant tumor cells a head start.”

Size matters

The research team, led by postdoctoral research associate and first author Jodie Pietruska, exposed human lung cells to nanoscale particles of metallic nickel and nickel oxide, and larger microscale particles of metallic nickel. A key finding is that while the smaller particles set off the HIF-1 alpha pathway, the larger metallic nickel particles proved much less problematic.

In other words, getting down to the nanoscale made the metallic nickel particles more harmful and potentially cancer-causing. Kane said the reason might be that for the same amount of metal by mass, nanoscale particles expose much more surface area and that makes them much more chemically reactive than microscale particles.

Another important result from the work is data showing a big difference in how nickel nanoparticles and nickel oxide nanoparticles react with cells, Pietruska said. The nickel oxide particles are so lethal that the cells exposed to them died quickly, leaving no opportunity for cancer to develop. Metallic nickel particles, on the other hand, were less likely to kill the cells. That could allow the hypoxia pathway to lead to the cell becoming cancerous.

“What is concerning is the metallic nickel nanoparticles caused sustained activation but they were less cytotoxic,” Pietruska said. “Obviously a dead cell can’t be transformed.”

Although Kane said the findings should raise clear concerns about handling nickel nanoparticles, for instance to prevent airborne exposure to them in manufacturing, they are not all that’s needed to cause cancer. Cancer typically depends on a number of unfortunate changes, Kane said. Also, she said, the study looked at the short-term effects of nickel nanoparticle exposure in cells in a lab, rather than over the long term in a whole organism.

Still, in her lab Kane employs significant safeguards to keep researchers safe.

“We handle all these materials under biosafety level 2 containment conditions,” she said. “I don’t want anyone exposed. We’re handling them as though they were an airborne carcinogen.”

In addition to Kane and Pietruska, other authors on the paper are Ashley Smith, Kevin McNeil, and Anatoly Zhitkovich, a toxicologist; chemist Xinyuan Liu; and engineer Robert Hurt. Kane, Hurt, and Zhitkovich are associated with Brown’s Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation.

STAC Awards Brown Engineers Funding for Collaborative Projects

The Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC) announced the awardees of the 2011 Collaborative Research Grant program. The awards will support eight projects representing the efforts of 23 scientists from 13 educational institutions, hospitals and private companies throughout Rhode Island. The Brown School of Engineering had scientists on two of the eight projects. Those projects will receive nearly $400,000 of the $1,435,822 that was awarded.  

Since the program's inception in 2007, STAC has awarded approximately $6.5 million to 38 teams of 97 researchers from 35 organizations -- and the program is returning dividends on this state investment. To date, STAC grant recipients have reported nearly $10 million in follow-on funding from federal and private sources. This outside investment has supported additional research efforts, new patents, new equipment and products and the formation of new companies.

Professors Christian Franck, Janet Blume, and Trey Crisco are working on concussion and traumatic brain injury and collaborating with Cheryl Liu, and Subham Sett from Simulia. They hope to work with companies in designing safer and improved protective gear and to aid the medical community in producing improved quantitative traumatic brain injury (TBI) diagnosis and assessment tools. They were awarded $194,809. 

Professor Bob Hurt and Love Sarin ScM'05 PhD'10 of Banyan Environmental will work to develop new technologies for reducing human health risks associated with anthropogenic mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and cement kilns. They were awarded $200,000.

The 2011 award recipients include academic and industry scientists pursuing research in disease prevention, mercury emission control, neurology and engineering and demonstrate the vitality and promise of the state's health, science, marine and technology sectors. Priority was given to high-impact projects that are collaborative across Rhode Island institutions, well positioned to receive follow-on funding, and aligned with the Rhode Island Science and Technology Plan.

Read the full press release (PDF) from the STAC
View presentation by Brendan McNally, Executive Director, RI-CIE (PDF)
Read the Providence Business story on the event
Read the Providence Journal story on the awardwinners

More about the 2011 Collaborative Research Grant Awardees:

Project 1: Development of multi-scale brain injury models for concussion and traumatic brain injury

This team is working to aid companies in designing safer and improved protective gear and to aid the medical community in producing improved quantitative traumatic brain injury (TBI) diagnosis and assessment tools.

Collaborators:
Christian Franck, Ph.D., Brown University
Janet Blume, Ph.D., Rhode Island Hospital
Joseph J. Crisco, Ph.D., Warren Alpert Medical School and Rhode Island Hospital
Cheryl Liu, Ph.D., Simulia
Subham Sett, Simulia

Project 2: Marine biofouling on high-performance molded materials

Researchers will use microscopic and molecular techniques to characterize the development of marine biofilms. By collaborating with a research university, Ametek SCP will be able to evaluate novel coatings and to expand its markets.

Collaborators:
Lucie Maranda, Ph.D., University of Rhode Island
Keunhan Park, Ph.D., University of Rhode Island
William Mildon, Ametek SCP

Project 3: A novel efficient technology for mercury emission control application

This team will work to develop new technologies for reducing human health risks associated with anthropogenic mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and cement kilns.

Collaborators:
Robert Hurt, Ph.D.,Brown University
Love Saran, Ph.D., Banyan Environmental Inc.

Project 4: A wound healing product for diabetic ulcers containing choroid plexus growth factors

Researchers will collaborate on development of a topical regenerative product for wound healing and will work to expand and strengthen preclinical research studies on the topic.

Collaborators:
Kim Boekelheide, MD/Ph.D.,Brown University
Moses Goddard, MD, CytoSolve
Chris Thanos, Ph.D., CytoSolve

Project 5: Antigenic targets of Candida albicans specific antibody fragments

The grant will support work to identify the molecular structure on the surface of the fungus Candida albican that are recognized by previously discovered antibodies to stop infection. This collaboration will support infrastructure at Bryant University, preliminary research for future federal grant dollars, and collaboration between universities.

Collaborators:
Joseph Bliss, MD/Ph.D., Women & Infants Hospital
Christopher Reid, Ph.D, Bryant University

Project 6: The inner-space classroom - Innovation for research and education in the ocean state

This group will develop software to provide access to marine science data and information through the University of Rhode Island's Inner Space Center. The grant will provide for increased marine science educational opportunities and enabling of research and education projects for federal funding.

Collaborators:
Dwight Coleman, Ph.D.,University of Rhode Island
Sara Hickox, University of Rhode Island
James Ferguson, RITE-Solutions

Project 7: Tick bite patch: Proof of concept for a first generation immunoinformatics derived anti-tick vaccine with transdermal delivery

This group will work to establish proof-of-principal for a catalytic approach to accelerate bench-to-clinic translation of a novel anti-tick vaccine for humans.

Collaborators:
Thomas Mather, Ph.D., University of Rhode Island
Keykavous Parang, Ph.D., University of Rhode Island
Anne DeGroot, MD, EpiVax, Inc.
William Martin, EpiVax, Inc.
Michael Jordan, Isis Biopolymers, Inc.
Leonard Moise, Ph.D., University of Rhode Island

Project 8: Tracing business-critical web applications

Researchers will develop techniques for comprehensive measurement of the performance of rich web applications by applying causal tracing techniques to both the server and client. This effort will combine the strengths of a university research setting with real client data.

Collaborators:
Rodrigo Fonesca, Ph.D., Brown University
Chris Erway, Ph.D., Tracelytics Inc.

Hurt and Webster publish "Business and Safety Issues in the Commercialization of Nanotechnology"

Professors Bob Hurt and Tom Webster just published the book "Business and Safety Issues in the Commercialization of Nanotechnology," Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings, Volume 1209, 2010. Editors are: L. Tsakalakos, L. Merhari, S. Mao, J. van Schijndel, T. J. Webster, H. Liu, and R. Hurt. (H. Liu is a recent Ph.D. graduate from Brown engineering).

More information on the book can be found at: http://www.mrs.org/s_mrs/sec_subscribe.asp?CID=24653&DID=271618

Testing nanomaterials for safety

"Scientists are preemptively testing the potentially ill effects of the tiny molecules and even atoms engineered at the scale of one billionth of a meter or smaller."

Carbon nanoparticles appear to be benign when fed to fruit fly larvae, but adults exposed to the nanoparticles in powdery form are not as lucky. Research led by David Rand and Robert Hurt show two varieties of carbon nanoparticles stuck to the flies, impeded them from climbing and ultimately caused them to die.

See full article at Scientific American:
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbon-nanomaterials-bad-for-fruit-fly-coating
See Brown news release: news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2009/08/nanotoxicity