Benoit Lessard, University of Ottawa
Host: Prof. Tim Bender
Our society is faced with an increasing challenge of E-waste, and with the proliferation of the internet of things and smart packaging, this is only going to get worse. Low cost printed electronics are facilitating the development of emerging technologies, from artificial skin to stretchable and bendable cell phone displays. The desire to integrate these materials onto biodegradable substrates or to use compostable active materials is necessary. Furthermore, the chemical toolbox available to us enables the fine-tuning of the materials to design and engineer the desired properties. This seminar will cover our groups recent advances in the simple fabrication of semiconductive single walled carbon nanotube transistors on high performing green dielectrics, advances towards the development of biodegradable and flexible transparent heaters, and the use of phthalocyanines as low cost semiconductors for the development of point-of-source sensors such as cannabinoid detection and speciation. We aim to build structure property relationships between material design, thin film processing, and device performance for the enabling of sustainable next-generation electronics.
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Professor Benoit Lessard joined the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of Ottawa in 2015 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in May 2019, and Cross Appointed to the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2020. He was awarded the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Advanced Polymer Materials and Organic Electronics (renewed in 2020), 2018 Ontario Early Researcher Award, the 2015 Charles Polanyi Prize in Chemistry, The University of Ottawa Early Career Researcher of the Year Awards for 2021, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Innovation award (under 40), 2022 The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering Lectureship award and NOVA Chemicals MSED Early Career Investigator Award. Prof. Lessard was also named a 2018 J. Mater. Chem. C Emerging Researcher (RSC), Flexible and Printed Electronics Emerging Leaders of 2023 (IOPscience) and 2023 “Small” Nano Micro Rising Star (Wiley Journals).
Since 2008, Prof. Lessard has published 147 peer reviewed journal articles, 16 patent applications, and presented his work over 150 times at international and national conferences. Lessard is co-founder of Ekidna Sensing inc, a spinoff company based on cannabinoid sensors. Prior to joining uOttawa, Prof. Lessard completed an NSERC Banting Fellowship at the University of Toronto studying crystal engineering and OPV/OLED fabrication and obtained his PhD (2012) from McGill University in Polymer reaction engineering.
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Questions? Please contact Michael Martino, External Relations Liaison (michael.martino@utoronto.ca)
Claudia Schmidt-Dannert, University of Minnesota
Host: Prof. Emma Master
In biological systems, simple building blocks such as proteins, nucleic acids and lipids are precisely organized to form higher ordered structures across multiple length scales. Harnessing the principles and mechanisms underlying the self-assembly and self-organization of natural structures and materials offers tremendous opportunities for the design and scalable fabrication of functional biomaterials with emergent properties. Proteins and peptides provide the greatest versatility for the bottom-up design and low-cost production of such self-assembling supramolecular materials due to the chemical diversity of their amino acid building blocks. They are also genetically encoded, allowing for the genetically programmable production of self-organizing materials using cell factories or synthesize self-assembling materials de novo via cell free expression systems. Proteins are also key players in the formation of inorganic-organic composite materials with properties unmatched by synthetic properties. Inspired by the spatial organization of enzymes at the subcellular level via protein nanostructures, we are taking advantage of these mechanisms for the design of self-assembling protein-based nano-architectures for different applications, including for in vitro biocatalysis and the fabrication of new types of functional materials. Of key interest to us is the discovery and design of mechanisms with which to interface protein-based materials with biomineralization processes to produce innovative materials with unique mechanical and other properties. I will discuss possibilities and examples from our work for the design of genetically encoded self-assembling 2D and 3D-protein scaffolds as functional materials for diverse applications, including for biocatalysis and biosynthesis and as living materials.
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Dr. Claudia Schmidt-Dannert is a Distinguished McKnight Professor and Kirkwood Chair of Biochemistry in the Dept. of Biochemistry and the Director of the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota.
She completed her B.S. and M.S. in Biochemistry and Genetics at the TU Braunschweig and performed her PhD research at the National Research Center for Biotechnology in Braunschweig (GBF, now Helmholtz Center for Infectious Diseases). She then moved to the University of Stuttgart and became group leader of the Molecular Biotechnology Group in the Institute of Technical Biochemistry (Rolf Schmid group). In 1998, she received a Habilitation Fellowship from the German Science Foundation for “molecular breeding of pathways” and with this project, joined Prof. Arnold’s group at Caltech. In 2000, she joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota.
Current research efforts in her group focus on using synthetic biology approaches for the design of genetically programmable materials for biosynthesis, biocatalysis and other applications, including the fabrication of living materials. Another area of expertise in her group is in the engineering of different microbial chassis organisms to produce valuable chemicals. Dr. Schmidt-Dannert has published numerous manuscripts, patents, and book chapters; serves as Editor and board member of several journals and received several awards such as a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship and McKnight Fellow- and Professorships.
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Questions? Please contact Michael Martino, External Relations Liaison (michael.martino@utoronto.ca)
Petros Koutrakis, Harvard University
Host: Prof. Jeffrey Brook
The recent Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study estimated that long-term exposure to fine particulates (PM2.5) caused 9 million deaths worldwide in 2019, making it the fourth-ranked global risk factor for that year. The PM properties responsible for its toxicity are still not fully understood. Recently, we found that radon (Rn) exposure is associated with mortality in the Northeastern U.S., and we have reported associations between PM gross β-activity and blood pressure, oxidative stress, and lung and cardiac function. A large fraction of the total exposure to naturally occurring ionizing radiation is through inhalation of ambient particles carrying attached radionuclides. The primary source of this PM radioactivity (PR) is Radon (Rn) gas through its decay products. Rn emanates from the soil and enters the atmosphere, including indoor air, where it decays. The resulting radionuclides attach to inhalable PM, which deposit in the lungs and continue to release ionizing radiation (α-, β- and γ-radiation) causing pulmonary inflammation and oxidative stress. To date, most previous environmental radiation studies have focused on the cancer effects of Rn progeny, therefore, there are significant knowledge gaps regarding the non-cancer effects of radon and PR. Our recent research has demonstrated that these non-cancer effects are, in fact, very important. Specifically, we have generated new information showing that exposures to Rn as well as PM gross α-, β- and γ-activities are associated with numerous adverse health outcomes, including blood pressure, oxidative stress, cardiac, lung and liver function, gestational diabetes and hypertension, and total and cardiopulmonary mortality.
These observations provide strong scientific evidence for our hypothesis that inhaled Rn progeny and other radionuclides, measured as PR, can have direct health effects through stimulation of inflammatory and oxidative processes. Therefore, assessing exposures and effects of PR may be of paramount importance to understanding of particle toxicity. During my presentations I will summarize many PR studies regarding measurement methods, sources, relationships between indoor and outdoor levels and, toxicity assays. Also, I will present results from cohort studies examining a large spectrum of health outcomes and population mortality studies. Finally, I will discuss research needs to advance this emerging research area.
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Petros Koutrakis has over 35 years of experience in environmental health sciences. His interests include human exposure assessment, ambient and indoor air pollution, environmental analytical chemistry, remote sensing, and environmental radioactivity. His research career has focused on studying exposure methods, developing sampling techniques for gaseous and particulate air pollutants, and studying the effects of air pollution on human health. His research group has conducted a large number of ambient and indoor air quality studies in the U.S. and abroad. These studies made it possible to identify and quantify the sources contributing to ambient, micro-environmental and indoor exposures. Finally, these investigations significantly advanced scientific knowledge of associations between exposures and health outcomes and made important contributions to assessments of the impacts of air pollution on human health in different populations.
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Questions? Please contact Michael Martino, External Relations Liaison (michael.martino@utoronto.ca)
Michael Koepke, LanzaTech
Host: Prof. Christopher Lawson
The accelerating climate crisis combined with rapid population growth poses some of the most urgent challenges to humankind, all linked to the unabated release and accumulation of CO2 and waste across the biosphere. Rapid action is needed to drastically reduce waste carbon emissions. By harnessing our capacity to partner with biology, we can begin to take advantage of the abundance of available CO2 and waste carbon streams to transform the way the world creates and uses carbon and enable a circular economy.
LanzaTech’s mission is to create a post-pollution future where waste carbon is the building block from which everything is made and since inception in 2005 has pioneered the development of a gas fermentation for carbon-negative biomanufacturing. Gas fermentation using carbon-fixing microorganisms is a fully commercial carbon recycling process technology that transforms above-ground sustainable and waste carbon resources into fuels, chemicals, materials and nutritional products at a scale that can be truly impactful in mitigating the climate crisis. LanzaTech’s technology is like retrofitting a brewery onto an emission source like a steel mill or a landfill site, but instead of using sugars and yeast to make beer, pollution is converted by bacteria to fuels and chemicals. The technology offers an industrial approach to both enable manufacturing at its current scale, and achieve sustainability targets.
Compared to other gas-to-liquid processes, gas fermentation offers unique feedstock and product flexibility. The process can handle a diverse range of high volume, low-cost feedstocks. These include industrial emissions (e.g., steel mills, processing plants or refineries) or syngas generated from any resource (e.g., unsorted, and non-recyclable municipal solid waste, agricultural waste, or organic industrial waste), as well as CO2 with green hydrogen.
Only 15 years ago, carbon-fixing microbes were poorly understood and considered to be genetically inaccessible and gas mass-transfer seen as major hurdle. To unlock this biology for industrial use, LanzaTech has developed a state-of-the-art Synthetic Biology and AI platform as well as advanced bioprocessing and bioreactor technology. Today, LanzaTech has 3 commercial plants in operation, >500 chemical pathways designed and >300,000 tons of CO2 mitigated. This lecture will provide an insight into the LanzaTech journey from scrappy start-up to global technology leader through the commercialization of its gas fermentation process as a platform, and give a perspective on the future for the industry at large.
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Dr. Michael Köpke is the Chief Innovation Officer at LanzaTech ($LNZA), a public company that uses biology to capture and transform carbon into sustainable products. Michael is a pioneer in synthetic biology of CO2-fixing microbes and carbon-negative biomanufacturing with 20 years of experience in the industrial biotech field. Since joining LanzaTech in 2009, Michael built up the company’s synthetic biology and computational biology capabilities and is responsible for LanzaTech’s innovation platform and technology partnerships.
Michael holds a Ph.D. in biotechnology from University of Ulm and is an inventor of over 500 patents and author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications. Michael is also an awardee of the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge award for Greener Synthetic Pathways by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In addition to his role at LanzaTech, Michael also serves as an adjunct faculty position at Northwestern University and as council member at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC). At EBRC, Michael chairs the roadmapping working group and led the development of a technical roadmap on synthetic biology solutions for climate and sustainability as part of a group of over 90 scientists and other experts. Michael also serves on several editorial or scientific boards and chaired several workshops and international conferences.
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Questions? Please contact Michael Martino, External Relations Liaison (michael.martino@utoronto.ca)
Meagan Mauter, Stanford University
Host: Prof. Frank Gu
Dynamic operating schema for unit processes, treatment trains, and water systems are critical for accommodating non-steady-state system inputs and water resource demands. This applies equally to small-scale treatment units with fluctuating water production volumes and quality, large desalination plants encountering energy costs that vary as much as 10X over hourly and seasonal time scales, and entire water systems that are subject to multi-year droughts of varying intensity, persistence, and duration. This talk will discuss the paradigm shift from steady state to dynamic system operation over multiple time domains and the resulting demands this shift places on membrane-based water treatment technologies. The talk will then turn to how to leverage native flexibility in both traditional reverse osmosis (RO) technologies and emerging dynamically operated technologies (e.g., batch RO) for maximal system resiliency. Finally, this talk will address open research questions critical to characterizing the financial value of flexibility in process, treatment train and system design and motivating an expanded dynamic operational range across these systems.
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Professor Meagan Mauter is an Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Global Environmental Policy at Stanford University and Senior Fellow in the Precourt Energy Institute and Woods Institute for the Environment. She directs the Water & Energy Efficiency for the Environment Lab (WE3Lab) with the mission of providing sustainable water supply in a carbon-constrained world. Ongoing research efforts include: 1) developing desalination technologies to support a circular water economy, 2) coordinating operation of decarbonized water and energy systems, and 3) supporting the design and enforcement of water-energy policies.
Professor Mauter also serves as the research director for the National Alliance for Water Innovation, a $110-million DOE Hub addressing U.S. water security issues. The Hub targets early-stage research and development of energy-efficient and cost-competitive technologies for distributed desalination of non-traditional source waters.
Professor Mauter holds bachelors degrees in Civil & Environmental Engineering and History from Rice University and a PhD in Chemical & Environmental Engineering from Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at Stanford, she served as an Energy Technology Innovation Policy Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Visiting Scholar at the Mossavar Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Katie Galloway, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Host: Prof. Nicole Weckman
Integrating synthetic circuitry into larger transcriptional networks to mediate predictable cellular behaviors remains a challenge within synthetic biology. In particular, the stochastic nature of transcription makes coordinating expression across multiple genetic elements difficult. Further, delivery of large genetic cargoes limits the efficiency of cellular engineering. Thus, our work is focused on the design of highly-compact genetic tools with a minimal genomic footprint. Co-localization of multiple transcriptional units provides a simple method of compact design. However, co-localization introduces the potential for physical coupling between transcriptional units. To address this challenge, we recently developed a theoretical framework for exploring how DNA supercoils—dynamic structures induced during transcription—influence transcription and gene expression in synthetic and native gene systems. Using this model, we find that DNA supercoiling strongly influences the profile of gene expression and that influence is defined by syntax—the relative orientation and position of genetic elements—and the enclosing boundary conditions. In exploring both synthetic and native gene regulatory networks, we find that supercoiling-mediated feedback changes the behaviors accessible to control and supports (or inhibits) the function of transcriptional networks. Importantly, we have recently confirmed several predictions from this model experimentally and used this model to design circuits with massively improved performance in primary cells. Our results suggest that supercoiling couples behavior between neighboring genes, representing a novel regulatory mechanism. Additionally, our predictions suggest why some circuit designs fail and provide a path to improving transgenic designs. Harnessing the insights from our model will enable enhanced transcriptional control, providing a robust method to tune expression levels, dynamics, and noise needed for the construction of transgenic systems for diverse cell engineering applications including cellular reprogramming.
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Katie Galloway is the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on elucidating the fundamental principles of integrating synthetic circuitry to drive cellular behaviors. Her lab focuses on developing integrated gene circuits and elucidating the systems level principles that govern complex cellular behaviors. Her team lever ages synthetic biology to transform how we understand cellular transitions and engineer cellular therapies. Galloway earned a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and a BS in Chemical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. She completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Southern California. Her research has been featured in Science, Cell Stem Cell, Cell Systems, and Development. She has won multiple fellowships and awards including the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star, Princeton’s CBE Saville Lecture Award, NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, the NIH F32, and Caltech’s Everhart Award.
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Questions? Please contact Michael Martino, External Relations Liaison (michael.martino@utoronto.ca)
George Shimizu, University of Calgary
Host: Prof. Mohamad Moosavi
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are transcending from fundamental to applied research, but their use in a large-scale process has not yet been realized. For many industrial uses, MOFs face a challenge of economical performance in a durable, scalable material implementable in an appropriate engineered form. This presentation will deal with three short stories spanning our efforts to design new porous solids while keeping an eye on real-world applications.
The first story concerns the use of MOFs as proton conductors. MOFs offer tunable structures capable of being loaded with protic carrier molecules. Key challenges were initially to enhance stability and levels of proton conduction. Numerous promising examples exist now and a higher technology challenge is the formation of high-performing membranes. Some of our recent work on making high-loaded MOF membranes based on cellulosic composites will be presented.
The second part will deal with a new approach to make MOFs. MOFs typically rely on a reticular (net-based) approach where metal and organic linkers define a topology and pore sizes. We have developed a new route to MOFs where the guest molecules can play a much greater role in structure determination – rather than simply filling the void, determining its structure. This approach relies on robust H-bonded intermediates. Results on the use of this approach for xylene isomer separation will be presented.
Finally, MOFs can be used like a sponge to trap selected gases and release them under some external stimulus (e.g., pressure drop, temperature increase). Such an approach has been challenging for post-combustion carbon capture owing to the presence of water and acid gases in the stream. CO2. We have developed a solid that has moved up the technology ladder, with different academic and industrial partners, to actually be capturing CO2 industrially at 25 tonnes per day scale. This talk will discuss some of the basic science and also the hurdles to translate from milligrams to industrial demonstration including the key aspect of being able to physisorb CO2 in the presence of water.
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George Shimizu completed a Ph.D. (Inorganic Chemistry) at the University of Windsor with Steve Loeb. This was followed by an NSERC postdoctoral position with Fraser Stoddart (Supramolecular Chemistry) at the University of Birmingham and an NSERC Visiting Fellow/Associate Research Officer position with John Ripmeester and Dan Wayner (Functional Materials) at the National Research Council. In 1998, Shimizu moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Calgary. Currently, he is a Full Professor and his research concerns novel inorganic-organic materials, mainly metal-organic frameworks.
All group research begins at a very fundamental level, but it is application-directed, and we strive to translate basic science to demonstration. Most work falls in the fields of gas separation with solid sorbents and proton conductors. Three startup companies have emerged from the group’s MOF research. George has received the Strem (2008) and Rio Tinto (2019) Awards for Inorganic Chemistry from the Chemical Institute of Canada and the Alberta Science and Technology Leadership Foundation Award for Energy and Environment Innovation (2021).
View the complete 2023-24 LLE schedule
Questions? Please contact Michael Martino, External Relations Liaison (michael.martino@utoronto.ca)