Dr. Benjamin Chu, Distinguished Professor
Department of Chemistry
Department of Materials Science & Engineering
Department of Biomedical Engineering (affiliated member)
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3400
631-632-7928(o) 631-632-7929(sec) Fax: 631-632-6518
The research activities of Benjamin Chu (BC) in the past five years were supported by the following agencies: the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Army Natick Laboratory, and the Petroleum Research Funds administered by the American Chemical Society. BC also participates on two block grants, notably the Garcia MRSEC on Engineered Surfaces at SBU sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the ChemMat CARS, administered by the University of Chicago, located at the Advanced Photon Source, and sponsored jointly by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.
The main thrust of these activities is closely related to materials chemistry, including polymer physics and colloid science. BC has been particularly interested in solving fundamental problems that have useful applications, of benefit to society. Being a world authority on laser light scattering, BC designs and constructs scattering instruments in the frontiers of light scattering and synchrotron small angle X-ray scattering techniques, together with integration of mechanical and spectroscopic measurements as well as processing methods, that can stretch, spin, and draw fibers. A world-class instrumentation facility has been established, specifically to investigate materials research problems, including nano-composites of modified carbon nanotubes/nanofibers with polymers, soluble polyelectrolyte-surfactant complexes for gene therapy applications, biomineralization and demineralization, supercritical fluids and molecular filters, modifications of nanostructured materials, modified fullerenes and polymer network formation, together with its applications to DNA capillary electrophoresis.
-Benjamin Chu