Jan Talbot / 2010 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award

NanoEngineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Professor Jan Talbot earned a 2010 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. Congrats!

This award recognizes a career of excellence in teaching both undergraduates and graduate students, mentoring graduate students, and contributing the development of educational curricula in her field.



According to Prof Talbot's Web page, her research interests include:

• Electrodeposition
  
• Electrophoretic deposition
  
• Information display screening technology
  
• Chemical mechanical polishing
• Solid state lighting materials
  
• Electrochemical transport phenomena
  
• Corrosion
  
• Materials science

Scenes from a NanoEngineering Lab: (Part 3)

Here is the third post on chemical engineering major Maria Zimmerman, who is an undergraduate student researcher in a nanomachine-focused lab run by NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang.

In a previous post, Maria said that she got her foot in the Wang lab door through a fellowship, and stayed because she loved it. It was a fellowship for the UC San Diego California Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) in Science, Engineering and Mathematics program.

In the first post and second post, Maria in photographed in the lab and gives a bit of advice to undergrads thinking about trying their (gloved) hands at research:

Maria said: "Ask for responsibility. The work only gets interesting if they trust you want to do it. You are just wasting your time if you go in to clean pipette tips."

But what does Maria actually do in the lab?

"I work in the nanomotors section of Dr Wang's research lab. My recent work has been on nanomotor controlled in vitro drug delivery. We are able to manually control the nanomotors ability to pick up, transport, and drop off cancer drug carrying microparticles. We are striving towards a realistic model for in vivo applications," said Maria Zimmerman. 

Undergraduate Snapshot from a NanoEngineering Lab (Part 2)

Maria Zimmerman is a senior at UC San Diego majoring in chemical engineering. Below are a few of her unfiltered thoughts about working in professor Joseph Wang's NanoEngineering lab, and about doing student research as an undergraduate. (I'm hoping Maria will also fill us in on what kind of research she is working on. Stay tuned. And be sure to check out her other lab shots here.)

"I started my research during the summer of 2009. I was supposed to leave at the end of the summer due to my fellowship, but I kept extending a few months at a time until now, a year and half later.

"At first I just wanted to publish a paper and work with the renowned Dr Wang just because it’s ambitious, and because I knew I needed to take advantage of this opportunity because it’s one of the most prestigious career training opportunities UC San Diego has to offer. Now I stay because it brought me closer to UC San Diego than anything else I've done in my four years here.

"The grad students and postdocs I answer to have become my friends as well as my professional mentors. Having this lab to drop by everyday makes this huge campus feel more personal. And of course, working so close to Dr. Wang really helps me understand what thinking and commitment it takes to be successful. I don't want to pursue a career chemical engineering because it’s ambitious anymore, but because I really can see myself doing it."

Maria Zimmerman's advice to other students:

1. Go for the gold! The labs that are the hardest to get in will be the most worth it. Those are the labs that will invest the most money in you.

2. Ask for responsibility. The work only gets interesting if they trust you want to do it. You are just wasting your time if you go in to clean pipette tips.

3. Get to know your mentor. They are filled to the brim with advice. They were undergraduates once too, and they usually have some pretty strong opinions about it.

Snapshots from a NanoEngineering Lab at UC San Diego Part 1

Last week when I was helping out with a photo shoot in one of the NanoEngineeringhttp://nanoengineering.ucsd.edu/ labs run by professor Joseph Wang, I ran into chemical engineering major Maria Zimmerman who is one of the undergraduate researchers in Joseph Wang's labs. I'm going to ask Maria for a few thoughts on her experiences as an undergraduate researcher, and post the responses here. If you have any questions for Maria, leave a comment or send me an email at: dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu.