Outreach

Lydia Xu and Jaskirat Sandhu from Martin Luther King High School has won the following awards:: - 2018 1st place in the category of chemistry at the 2018 Science Fair of Riverside County.; - 2018 Honorable Mention at California State Science Fair
Andrea Noronha, Redland East Valley High School won the following awards:: - 2017 3rd Place, Chemistry, Intel ISEF; - Honorable Mention, American Chemical Society, Intel ISEF; - 2017 3rd Place, Chemistry, State Science Fair; - 2017 Gold and Sweepstakes Winner in Senior Category, Regional Science Fair; - 2015 Intel ISEF Finalist; - 2015 Office of Naval Research Science Award
Michael Janner, a high school student worked in our lab for 3 years, continued to harvest awards in science fairs. This year his project is titled "Assembly of Magnetic Particles and Magnetic Holes into 1D, 2D, and 3D Photonic Crystals". Here is a summary of his awards from the fairs in 2013:: 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair: 1st place grand award in Materials and Bioengineering, 2nd place special award of $1500 from SPIE, 1st place Innovation Exploration Award; 2013 California State Science Fair: 1st place in Chemistry
Michael Janner recently published his research results in Nano Letters, a top tier journal in the field of nanoscience. Due to his significant contribution to the work, he shared the co-first authorship with graduate student Qiao Zhang. Together they discovered the self-assembly of novel two-dimensional photonic labyrinth structures under magnetic fields and further developed an effective method to solidify the structures and enable detailed characterization. This work is believed to provide a platform for fabricating novel materials and devices. This work has also been highlighted by Nature Photonics (2013, 7,428)
Roshan Plamthottam, a junior in Upland High School worked on "The Self-Assembly of Diamagnetic Materials Using a Magnetic Field", won 4th place in the 2013 California State Science Fair in the Physics & Astronomy Category.
Michael Janner competed again at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and won 2nd place in Chemistry and special awards from NASA ($1,000) and from United Technologies Corporation ($3,000). He was also invited to present his project on "Fabrication and manipulation of one-dimensional photonic crystals" to legislators at the California State Capitol. He also won 1st place in California State Science Fair again in the category of chemistry for his project on "Assembly of Magnetic Particles and Magnetic Holes into 1D, 2D, and 3D Photonic Crystals".
Michael Janner, 15, a freshman at Redlands East Valley High School, won first place in his division in May 2011 at the California State Science Fair in Sacramento for his project "Synthesis and Manipulation of Silver and Gold Nano-Mirrors." In the summer of 2010, Michael carried out this research in our laboratory under the guidance of Qiao. Michael also competed in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles, and won four awards. He won a $3,000 special first-place award from the U.S. Air Force, a $1,500 second-place grand award in chemistry, a third-place $2,000 award from the American Chemical Society and a first-place $1,000 award from the American Intellectual Property Law Association for his project.
We are collaborating with Mr. Filip Bihelovic at Chem-Toddler.com in promoting Chemistry among children and young students. Please visit this interesting website for many exciting demonstrations of chemistry experiments. Soon you will find our contributions there! "The aim of this project is to popularize chemistry and to bring science closer and more understandable and fun for everyone."---Chem-Toddler.com
Ms. Sheba S. Plamthottam, a junior in Upland High School, has won the 4th place with a medal in the 2008 California State Science Fair Competition in the Chemistry category. She carried out a project entitled "Green Preparation and Characterization of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanocrystals". Under Jianping's supervision, she developed a synthetic procedure for the preparation of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanocrystals by following the green chemistry principle. Her method has the advantage of being economical and environmentally friendly. Prior to the state competition, she also won the 1st Place Gold Medal in the San Bernardino County.
We enthusiastically supported Ms. Lisa Fleming and other two undergraduate students from the Moore School of Electrical & Systems Engineering at University of Pennsylvania for their senior project "Inkless Color Blackboard with Memory". The goal of the project is to build a blackboard by creating a two-dimensional array of isolated electromagnets which can be programmed to control the color of pixels (our tunable photonic crystals)
Ms. Magaly Vargas, an undergraduate student from University of Costa Rica (another UCR in Central America) presented our research on tunable photonic crystals to her class. Her presentation was well-received.
We worked with the Science Museum at London on an online exhibition to teach kids from all over the world about "nano-technicolour".