Teams of undergraduate students huddled quietly around the gray metal desks in the teaching labs at Harvard’s Science Center. Each group was creating a calorimeter out of a used soda can and scavenged Styrofoam cups to determine the energy density and efficiency of the biodiesel they had extracted the week before from waste fryer oil provided by Annenberg Dining Hall.

The students’ research factors into both scholarship and institutional action as Harvard works to generate solutions to the challenge of climate...

Joanna Aizenberg belongs to the world’s finest as far as bio-inspired materials engineering goes, says Nico Sommerdijk (Chemical Engineering). “Her research reaches across disciplines and is highly innovative.” Aizenberg hails from Russia, received her PhD in Israel, and has been working at Harvard in the US since 1996.

Joanna Aizenberg will become a Distinguished Professor at TU/e, meaning they will visit Eindhoven a week every year for at least for years to give lectures for students or meet with TU/e researchers. 

Press release: https://www.cursor....

Joanna Aizenberg & Michael Brenner were elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.  The Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research.

Joanna Aizenberg was selected as a 2014 MRS Fellow "For pioneering contributions in fundamental understanding of biological materials; and for design and assembly of biomimetic architectures with controlled wetting, optical, and mechanical response."

The BBC features a news story on adaptive slippery materials, work just published in Nature Materials.

Slippery when wet: Flexing the material stops a running droplet of liquid in its tracks

A tent that blocks light on a sunny day and becomes transparent and waterproof on a dim, rainy one could be an outcome of work by US scientists.

The new material can change between two states when stretched, altering both its transparency and its roughness.

The team from Harvard's Wyss Institute have published their...

A 3 day workshop bringing together the scholars from the four Kavli Nanoscience Institutes.

May 29 - June 1, 2013

Gran Melia Resort

Rio Grande, Puerto Rico

Our vision is to bring 40-45 inspired people together, in a relaxed environment, to discuss the future of the nanobiosciences and the associated activities in the Kavli Institutes. 
 
The Nanoscience Nexus - the 1st International Conference of Kavli Nanoscience Institutes will start: May 29, 2013, evening, and end: June 1, 2013, lunch time. Venue:  The Gran...

Dr. Benjamin Simons , Professor of Neuroscience-University of Cambridge

This program, entitled the Science Research Lecture Series, seeks to introduce the broader local community to the exciting research of our faculty in a manner accessible to lay audiences. These talks will be scheduled throughout the year and open to all who are interested. The first lecture in this relaunched series will take place on Wednesday, February 27 at 7:00pm in Harvard Science Center Hall C, One Oxford Street, Cambridge. Jeff Lichtman, professor of molecular and cellular biology, will present his work in a talk titled, "Connectomics: Mapping the Brain."

Abstract:...

Materials scientist will be honored for her "research in biomineralization and the control of templated nucleation and growth of crystals"

Joanna Aizenberg has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard News Office.)

Cambridge, Mass. - November 28, 2012 - Joanna Aizenberg, Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS),...

Planning to have roast turkey at Christmas? You’ll be glad to hear that physicists have revealed exactly how to carve it – using jelly and a fishing line.

As reviews of the year in science focus inevitably and rightly on the discovery of a Higgs-like boson, it’s more tempting than ever to regard the Large Hadron Collider’s awesome tunnels as representative of the current state of play in physics. So it is good to be reminded that there is still an abundance of far more modest, mundane and much closer-to-home questions for physicists to solve besides looking for the origins of mass....

Radhika Nagpal is a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, where she heads the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group in the study of collective behavior in biological systems and how such behaviors can be applied to computing and robotics. A professor at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), her research draws on inspiration from social insects and multicellular biology, with the goal of creating globally robust systems made up of many cooperative parts. Nagpal also investigates complex...

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Stephen Mann,  School of Chemistry, University of Bristol

When: 4:15 p.m. - April 5, 2012

Where: North West Building, B103 - 52 Oxford Street

Understanding how chemically derived processes control the construction and organization of matter across extended and multiple length scales is of growing interest in many areas of materials research. In this lecture, I discuss current equilibrium and non-equilibrium self-assembly approaches to the synthetic construction of discrete hybrid (...

Cambridge, Mass., May 3, 2011 — Biomaterials pioneer Joanna Aizenberg has been named a new director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology (KIBST) at Harvard University, starting July 1.

Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Material Sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), where she runs the Aizenberg Biomineralization and Biomimetics Lab. She is also a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology; the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at...

At the White House yesterday, President Barack Obama welcomed the four American laureates of the 2014 Kavli Prizes - prizes awarded to scientists who have made seminal advances in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.
 
Joined by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Associate Director Jo Handelsman, the President congratulated Kavli Prize Laureates Alan H. Guth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Andrei D. Linde (Stanford University), John O'Keefe (University College London) and Marcus E. Raichle (...