Frontiers in Nanotechnology Seminar Series Presents, Jeffrey E. Dick from Purdue University

“Tiny Droplets, Big Implications: Discovering Surprising Physicochemical Properties at the Nanoscale“

Over the last decade, several reports have documented the remarkable physicochemical properties of nanodroplets. These reports have established a nanodroplet’s ability to accelerate chemical reactions by orders of magnitude and generate highly reactive molecules capable of driving unfavorable reactions. This talk will detail our group’s involvement in this interesting scientific discourse by beginning with an overview of previous work and a short course on single entity electrochemistry.

By designing membraneless protocells (nanodroplets suspended in oil), we will show that enzymatic reactions in these nanoreactors, a system more closely related to intracellular volumes, are accelerated with the inverse of nanodroplet size. We will then take a tour through experiments on a soap bubble film. At first, these experiments may seem disparate, but they serendipitously paved the way for the rigorous quantitation of reaction acceleration at the discrete nanodroplet|gas interface. By comparing these results to results at the liquid|liquid interface, our experiments reveal that reactions are accelerated by at least an order of magnitude more at the gas|liquid interface, an apples-to-apples comparison that was seemingly impossible to make with other techniques.

While contact electrification and triboelectricity have been implicated in curious nanodroplet chemistry, there are very few reports on truly new physical properties of nanodroplets. In the last portion of the talk, the secret movements of adsorbed droplets will be unlocked, revealing never-before-seen violent motions at the nanoscale that may begin to explain how reactive intermediates form.

Get to Know Jeffrey

Jeffrey E. Dick received a B.S. in Chemistry from Ball State University in 2013 and then embarked on graduate studies under the guidance of Prof. Allen J. Bard at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2018, Prof. Dick began his independent career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently the Richard B. Wetherill Associate Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University. Over the past 6 years, Prof. Dick’s scientific discoveries have spanned interdisciplinary fields, including the discovery that enzyme kinetics are inversely proportional to nanoreactor size, the synthesis of high entropy alloy nanoparticles at room temperature, the quantification of charge distribution for energy storage devices, the synthesis of reactive radical salts, and the elucidation of nanometric motions of adsorbed microdroplets.

These scientific pursuits have been recognized by several awards, including the 2024 National Fresenius Award, 2024 Early Career Investigator Award (Analytical Chemistry & ACS Measurement Science Au), Analyst Emerging Investigator Lectureship, 2023 ACS ANYL Findeis Award, 2023 Pittcon Achievement Award, 2023 Royce Murray Young Investigator Award, 2023 Hach Distinguished Lectureship, the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the 2021 NSF CAREER Award.