Scranton Students and Professor Make Major Breakthrough in Nanoparticle Research

By Marcus Smith '27, Student C orrespondent

It's not every day that students get to work on prominent scientific research, but several graduate and undergraduate students from The University of Scranton had that opportunity last year at the helm of Riddhiman Medhi, Ph.D., from the University's Chemistry Department.

The group of seven students worked closely with Dr. Medhi to figure out a solution to a problem that has plagued chemists for years.

"Metal nanoparticles in our field of research so far have been mostly made in water, and the moment you try to put them into any other liquid, they aggregate. These particles have optical properties, but when they aggregate, they lose their optical properties," Dr. Medhi explained.

Over the course of three years and with the help of his student researchers, Dr. Medhi succeeded in stabilizing various metal particles, especially gold and silver, to a point where they could resist solvents that are used in chemistry research.

The ways metal nanoparticles can be studied have expanded dramatically because of the group's research.

"Reactions that cannot be done in water can now be done, because now we're able to transfer them into other solvents and liquids where different kinds of chemistry are possible," he said.

Madison Waltz ʼ27, a chemistry and history double-major from Dunmore, was one of the undergraduate students who took part in the lab research.

Working with Dr. Medhi was her first experience doing lab work when she joined the project in her freshman year at Scranton.

"Dr. Medhi was my general chemistry professor and I saw that he put some of his work with the nanoparticles on his lecture slides. I thought it was really cool, so I went to his office hours and the rest is history," Waltz said.

She said that working on such groundbreaking scientific research was surprising, and not something she expected to be able to do as an undergraduate student.

Not only that, helping Dr. Medhi write the research paper proved to be helpful in her other classes, as well.

"Writing up certain sections, doing the background research for some of the work has been foundational to my abilities that I use now in my classes because it's just a different type of writing, very different to traditional stuff," she explained.

In addition to working with students from Scranton, Dr. Medhi also collaborated with John C. Deàk, Ph.D., from Scranton's Department of Chemistry, and T. Randall Lee, Ph.D., from the University of Houston in Houston, Texas, to conduct imaging of the nanoparticles being studied.

"We need to look at the properties of the particles we made, so we measured their size using dynamic light scattering and high-resolution electron microscopy, and they helped with that," Dr. Medhi said.

Given the significance of the work Medhi and his team carried out, their paper was chosen as the cover article for the Nov. 2 issue of the scientific journal "Materials."

"The main kind of advantage of our work is that it's a problem that a lot of researchers face," Dr. Medhi said. "So I think when we published this work as a solution to this common problem, I think that's what kind of caught their attention and they made it a cover story because of the wide application…our work showed a broad scope of our methods being applicable and consistent across different types of particles."

Waltz advised anybody considering conducting scientific research at an undergraduate level to just go out and communicate with their professors.

"Be upfront, talk to professors if you're interested in getting into research, send an email, go to their office hours. That's what I did," she said. "And over time, you learn, especially here at Scranton, that you have plenty of people around you to help you get better at research."