IMPACT OF AIRBORNE PARTICLES - Anthrax spores in a building, dust from the World Trade Center collapse blowing through downtown neighborhoods, soldiers marching through battlefield smoke - all of these are situations where the behavior and properties of airborne particles can have a significant effect on humans. Clarkson University Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Philip Hopke can provide expert comment on airborne particulates, sampling and analysis methods, implications to human health, methods for identifying sources of airborne particles, and deposition of airborne particulates. Hopke is Chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committees on Air Quality Management in the United States and on Research Priorities for Airborne Particulate Matter.
BIOSENSORS FOR DETECTION OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGENTS - Clarkson University Professor of Chemical Engineering Ian Suni, in collaboration with Professor of Biology Linda Luck, is working on the development of biosensors for the detection of biological warfare agents, environmental toxins, and other proteins of analytical interest to the field of biotechnology.
COMMUNITIES PULLING TOGETHER DURING TIMES OF CRISIS - After 9/11, American communities drew closer together, supporting each other in their grief and fear. Professor of Technical Communications Stephen Doheny-Farina observed this same reaction on a smaller scale in 1998, as a vast stretch of the Northeast drew together after a massive ice storm wiped out the power grid for three million people and isolated the region's residents from their usual network of electronic communications. In his book, The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Communities, Surviving Disaster (Yale: 2002), Doheny-Farina examines how a community, when faced with the loss of electronic communications on which we have come to depend as a society, rediscovered face-to-face interaction and renewed the bonds of neighborhoods.
NANOPARTICLES AGAINST ANTHRAX - Clarkson University Professor of Chemistry Richard Partch is collaborating with researchers at the University of Florida on the development of nanoparticles for in vivo controlled and selective removal of overdosed drugs from the bloodstream. There is potential for this technique to be applied as well to inactivate anthrax spores in the lung by preventing them from being encapsulated by macrophage and transported through the lung membrane and into the blood. Partch can comment on how particles can be developed with particular surface properties to potentially accomplish these goals.
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