Whats New and Noteworthy in Luminescence Spectroscopy and Imaging?
Pat O’Hara, Chemistry, Amherst College. Many of today’s advances in biotechnology and medical imaging have been made possible through clever coupling of mature ideas from physical chemistry and new advances in molecular biology. Over 100 years ago, physicists such as Stokes and Rayleigh provided a framework for understanding such phenomena as the fluorescence of light from excited molecules and the scattering of light from large particles in solution. Today these ideas and others have been co-opted by incredibly clever molecular biologists who have put them to work for in vivo tumor imaging, or to understand disease morphology in Tay-Sachs or Alzheimer’s disease. This workshop will explore several of these technological breakthroughs and use them as a vehicle for exploring the foundational physical and chemical ideas that make them possible. Oct. 18 – The Biology of the Poles. Marie Silver, STEM Education Institute. As part of UMass’ participation in the International Polar Year resear
