Junior Faculty Members' Research Grants:
Chemistry, Geology, Literary Studies

The Bryn Mawr faculty brought in a near-record number of research grants last academic year, the Provost's Office reports, and it isn't only Bryn Mawr veterans who have received funding. Junior faculty members have attracted the notice of foundations as well. Here are brief overviews of research projects for which three young faculty members — a chemist, a geologist and a literary scholar — have recently won funding.

Carbon Nanotubes: Don’t Just Stand There — Do Something

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Jonas Goldsmith was awarded a $30,000 unrestricted research grant by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The award was made as part of a program that helps chemists beginning their first tenure-track appointments initiate independent research programs. Goldsmith is using the funding to investigate methods of modifying carbon surfaces, with the ultimate goal of producing carbon nanotubes with potentially useful properties.

"The molecular structure of graphite is that it has sheets of carbon atoms one molecule thick that are all stacked on top of each other. If you imagine taking just one of those sheets and rolling it up into a tube, you can understand the structure of a carbon nanotube," Goldsmith says. "It has a thickness of basically one carbon atom; it has a diameter of a couple of nanometers, which means that about 50,000 of them can fit into a human hair."

Because graphite conducts electricity, there is intense interest in the potential application of carbon nanotubes in electronics. According to Goldsmith, the technology now used for reducing the size of computer circuits is approaching its physical limits. Carbon nanotubes could potentially be used to make circuits many times smaller than the smallest ones even theoretically possible with the current techniques.

Goldsmith's project, he says, is to "make molecules that have one part that can attach to the surface and then another part that can do something interesting. I'm using transition-metal complexes for the part that can do something interesting." Transition metals, he explains "often have interesting magnetic properties or interesting photophysical properties — either they glow or they absorb light in some particular way."

After creating the molecules, Goldsmith and his research team (he's currently assisted in the lab by Rachel Usala '07 and Eden McQueen '09 ) will attach them to larger sheets of carbon. "To a molecule, whether the surface is flat or rolled up, it will look more or less the same," he says. He plans to use electrochemical techniques to measure how quickly, strongly and densely they attach to the surface; he then hopes to use the complexes in conjunction with actual nanotubes.

According to Goldsmith, one of the primary practical barriers to using nanotubes in electronics is the near-impossibility of placing them on circuits —"you can make the nanotubes, but there's no efficient way to make them go where you want them to go." One potential application of transition-metal complexes that can bond to carbon surfaces is to guide nanotubes to the right places, creating a sort of self-assembling circuit.

Solving the Riddle of an Absent Geologic Record

This summer, Keck Postdoctoral Fellow in Geology Catherine Riihimaki and her research assistant, Zoe Ruge '08, will travel to the Powder River Basin in Northeast Wyoming to undertake a research project funded by a $27,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Riihimaki and a colleague from Yale University are the co-principal investigators for the project, which will apply a new geochemical technique to a problem that has long stymied geologists: interpreting the geologic record left by the rivers that etched out the dramatic topography of the Rockies.

"Often the geologic record is compared to the pages of a book," Riihimaki says. "When we look at sedimentary deposits, we turn a page deeper into history with each layer. But in a landscape formed by erosion, what happens is that rivers systematically erode these pages, and what's left is an absence of data."

"The Rocky Mountains are characterized by their spectacular relief — high-elevation mountains immediately adjoining low plains," she says. "But if you had been standing there shortly after the mountains were formed 50-80 million years ago, you'd hardly notice the topography. The mountains would be thin spines poking out of extensive sedimentary deposits left by the mountains' formation. The dramatic landscape was created by rivers, but we know very little about how this happened."

Riihimaki hopes that the Powder River Basin, because it is rich in coal seams, will help us learn more about the pace of erosion in the Rockies.

"When coal is exposed by erosion," she explains, "it burns, and the heat from the fire bakes the minerals around it. We'll use a new technique called thermal chronometry, which measures a characteristic of a mineral that changes when it's exposed to heat, to determine when the minerals were exposed."

In the Powder River Basin, Riihimaki and her team will look at "clinker"— rocks containing uranium and thorium that have been heated by coal fires. As a result of radioactive decay, helium forms in these minerals at a constant pace. But when the minerals are heated, the helium is released.

"The release of the helium resets the clock," Riihimaki says. Measuring the helium present in a piece of clinker will allow her to calculate when it was exposed to heat, and thus roughly when the coal near it was exposed by erosion and burned.

The research will begin to fill in major gaps in geologists' knowledge about the history of earth's climate. "Most of our knowledge of climate comes from ocean sediments or ice cores, so the information comes from places very far away from the Rocky Mountains. What we know now is temperature and atmospheric composition going back a few hundred thousand years. We have no records of river discharge or flooding — very little knowledge of the hydrology of a given area." Techniques like thermal chronometry have the potential to change that.

Wandering Through Victorian Literature

Assistant Professor of English Kate Thomas has been named a 2006-07 fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. The fellowship includes a $3,000 grant to fund research that will be presented at the forum, a multidisciplinary gathering that meets weekly and focuses on a different topic each year. Next year's topic is travel; Thomas plans to investigate the theme of vagrancy in English literature of the Victorian era.

"The etymology of the word 'travel' is associated with 'travail,' or suffering," Thomas notes. "We now understand travel to be primarily self-motivated, but people are also 'traveled' against their will. I'm interested in how this change came about. At the time when England was defining itself as a post-slavery nation, who were the figures who were made to travel involuntarily? Who was left out of the picture of Victorian commercial and recreational travel and cosmopolitanism?"

The character of vagrancy, Thomas says, was profoundly affected by the Industrial Revolution. Not only did economic changes displace large numbers of people from the countryside; legal changes weakened or eradicated feudal structures that required communities to care for the poor, and those left without support could, for the first time, be made to move on.

Thomas says she was inspired to pursue the topic by a document she found while she was researching an 1885 statute that criminalized homosexuality in Britain.

According to Thomas, the 1885 law is a watershed for queer theorists: "It is often cited as the first law that criminalizes a type of person, rather than a behavior.

"When I was researching it, I found a memorandum from the Home Secretary that criticized the law as not having enough enforcement muscle, as compared to vagrancy laws. It struck me that the vagrant was an earlier type that was criminalized, and there is a very strong link between vagrancy and homosexuality. I'll be examining texts with an eye to correspondences between mobility and sexual immorality," she says.

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