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Investigating Interactions in Polymer Blends
By
Barbara Spector
Anna Christina Balazs '75, Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, uses computer simulation to study the thermodynamic and kinetic behavior of polymer blends and composites.
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Anna Christina Balazs '75 |
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"The computer is our test tube," she says. Her calculations uncover how interactions among particles control the morphology and behavior of nanocomposites. The nanoparticles and polymer layers are self-assembling; they spontaneously mix together and arrange themselves in different mesoscale configurations (the point at which atomic phenomena begin to influence the properties of the blend). "We don't give them any instructions," Balazs notes.
"We take that mesoscale morphology and use other simulation tools to predict what the mechanical, optical and electrical properties would be," she explains.
In March 2005, Balazs reported a major discovery: Her group could control the self-assembly of nanoparticle/copolymer mixtures, directing the particles to form a molecule of a particular shape. The multi-step processes involved, which commonly occur in nature, are extremely difficult to reverse-engineer. The discovery was accomplished through "a lot of trial and error," with researchers choosing different components and tweaking a variety of parameters before they achieved the desired morphology, she says.
Inspiration and Collaboration
Balazs, a fellow of the American Physical Society, has received many honors for her work, including the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award, which recognizes faculty for outstanding research and scholarly activity at Pittsburgh, and the National Science Foundation's Special Creativity Award, a two-year research funding extension that enables recipients to pursue "high-risk" opportunities. In addition to her Distinguished Professor status, Balazs is the Robert Von der Luft Professor and a researcher in Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Institute of NanoScience and Engineering.
Balazs is also a senior visiting fellow at the Oxford Center for Advanced Materials and Composites and the materials science department of Oxford University in England. Her work there began in 2000-01, when she took a sabbatical year as a visiting fellow at Oxford 's Corpus Christi College to collaborate with theoretical physicist Julia Yeomans, whose research focuses on modeling complex fluids.
"I kept running into Julia at meetings, and we admired each other's work," says Balazs, whose portion of the joint project involves investigating the hydrodynamic behavior of polymeric composites. "The collaboration advanced both of our research aims and goals." Her current fellowship "is a way of formalizing these collaborations," she says.
Balazs has also consulted for firms such as Dow Chemical Company. "There is a real pleasure in working with industry," she says. "You get inspiration into their critical needs and the problems that need to be solved."
At Pittsburgh, Balazs especially enjoys mentoring undergraduates. "They're so excitable," she observes. "They actually do shout 'Eureka' and jump up and down." She taps the top students in her freshman course for integration into her research group and has published about 20 papers with undergraduate co-authors.
Scholarly Emphasis
Balazs, a native of Hungary, escaped with her family during the revolution of 1956; they first settled in Canada and came to the United States when she was 10 years old. She originally considered attending Bryn Mawr College because "I thought going to a women's college would be a really good thing"; once she visited the campus, she had "a very emotional response" to the architecture and the people she met. "Bryn Mawr seemed to embody all the good things about the ivory tower — a quiet space where scholarship was celebrated," she says.
She became a physics major at the College. "My father was a biologist, and he clearly loved doing science," she recalls. "It was something we talked about at the dinner table." She treasures the memories of her "amazing teachers," such as Rosalie Hoyt, Alfonso Albano and Walter Michels. "These were exceptionally caring people," she says. "Their doors were never closed.
"The education I got at Bryn Mawr in physics was a very, very close personal relationship," she says. "There was a real interest in you on the teacher's part."
After Bryn Mawr, Balazs attended graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received her Ph.D. in 1981. She refers to her time at MIT as "my formative years." When she first arrived, she remembers being somewhat intimidated, but the institutional culture seemed to impart the message that "if you just gave it a try, there would be a chance that you'd succeed," she explains. "If you're here, you're good enough."
Attending a school with so many engineers and physicists gave her a sense of connection that was "like a rebirth," Balazs says. "It instilled an incredible self-confidence in me, but in a very nurturing way."
Balazs came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1987 along with her husband, Steven P. Levitan, who is now the John A. Jurenko Professor of Computer Engineering. Levitan had attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst while Balazs was at MIT, and the couple had vowed never to live apart again, she says. Like many married university-based researchers, they faced the challenge of finding two academic jobs in the same region. "The university could solve the two-body problem for us," Balazs says. She first joined the department of materials science and engineering and moved to the department of chemical and petroleum engineering in 1997.
Barbara Spector writes on science and technology as well as business topics. She is the editor-in-chief of Family Business magazine and former editor of The Scientist .
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