John Berg
2006 Catalyst Article
This was a busy year with the usual activities of teaching and research. Richard Daniel completed his PhD work on ink-jet printing and has started a position at Battelle PNNL, so that with one new grad student, the group is seven strong. Two of my PhD students (Alvin Huang and Pete Laxton) have been making good progress in DOE-sponsored research into understanding some of the fundamentals of dense clay dispersions as models for buried transuranic wastes at Hanford. Another PhD student (Felix Nguyen) is pioneering new acoustic techniques for studying adhesive failure in composites. Felix and I attended the Adhesion Society conference in Mobile, Alabama, where Felix presented some of this work. Yet another PhD student (Daniel Ramrus) is making great progress in the study of adhesion using spatially-patterned primers. This work has resulted in a patent application, and Daniel presented some of it at the ACS Surface & Colloid Science Symposium in Potsdam, New York. Master’s student Ryan Reed is working on fiber-reinforced composites in Toyota-sponsored research, and Mindy Miller is working on paint adhesion in Boeing-sponsored work. The “new guy,” who just joined the group in June (Saran Poovarodom), will be working in the area of nanocomposites.
I also had an active group of five undergrad researchers, with projects sponsored by Procter & Gamble, 3M ESPE, and Samsung. We had fun attending the Northwest Regional Student Chapter Conference (at Oregon State this year), where two of the students presented research papers.
Other activities included my short course on Surfaces, Colloids and Nanoscience, which was successful again this summer. I’m also continuing to serve as editor of the journal: Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, and in between these and other activities am attempting to complete writing my textbook: An Introduction to Interfaces, Colloids and Nanoscience. It may never see the light of day, but I am enjoying the effort and not even thinking of retirement.
