Glen Helen and Little Miami River Water Quality Fall 2015

Service Learning Intensive (SVI) - a teaching and learning pedagogy that engages faculty, students, and community members in a partnership to achieve academic learning objectives, meet community needs, promote civic responsibility, and reflect on the learning experience. More specifically, the objectives for this course are for students to: Apply environmental chemistry concepts learned in the classroom to the interpretation environmental analysis results Use Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) through the use of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and EPA methods for the analysis of metals, anions, dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature, conductivity, ammonia, and turbidity Follow up on previous years’ results showing elevated E. coli and nitrates at some sites Present results to key stakeholders in the Village of Yellow Springs and Greene County Perform residential well sampling Complete periodic written reflections to tie classroom, laboratory, field, and community service experiences togethe

Highly Concentrated Seed-Mediated Synthesis of Monodispersed Gold Nanorods

The extremely large optical extinction coefficient of gold nanorods (Au-NRs) enables their use in a diverse array of technologies, rnging from plasmonic imaging, therapeutics and sensors, to large area coatings, filters, and optical attenuators. Development of the latter technologies has been hindered by the lack of cost-effective, large volume production. This is due in part to the low reactant concentration required for symmetry breaking in conventional seed-mediated synthesis. Direct scale up of laboratory procedures has limited viability because of excessive solvent volume, exhaustive postsynthesis purification processes, and the generation of large amounts of waste (e.g., hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide­(CTAB)). Following recent insights into the growth mechanism of Au-NRs and the role of seed development, we modify the classic seed-mediated synthesis via temporal control of seed and reactant concentration to demonstrate production of Au-NRs at more than 100-times the conventional concentration, while maintaining independent control and narrow distribution of nanoparticle dimensions, aspect ratio, and volume. Thus, gram scale synthesis of Au-NRs with prescribed aspect ratio and volume is feasible in a 100 mL reactor with 1/100th of organic waste relative to conventional approaches. Such scale-up techniques are crucial to cost-effectively meet the increased demand for large quantities of Au-NRs in emerging applications