Integrated Calendar

A new type of plastic made from plants
Gadi Rothenberg
Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences, University of Amsterdam
g.rothenberg@uva.nl
http://hims.uva.nl/hcsc

How often do you invent something that can truly change people’s lives and make the world a better place? We’ve been working on catalyst discovery and development for bulk chemicals and sustainable energy for over a decade, and during those years we found a few nice things, but nothing truly spectacular. And then, four years ago, we discovered by accident a new type of biodegradable polymer made from 100% plant-based materials. It would be nice to say that this involved years of study and preparation, but in fact we were very lucky.

This new plastic is non-toxic, non-hazardous, and cheap enough to replace polyurethane and in some cases polypropylene and PET. We are now scaling up its manufacturing and finding a host of new and exciting things. In the lecture, I will tell you how we discovered this plastic, and discuss the pros and cons of making chemicals and polymers from biomass.



Gadi Rothenberg is Professor and Chair of Heterogeneous Catalysis and Sustainable Chemistry at the Van `t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, and teaches courses on catalysis, thermodynamics and scientific writing. He has published 140 papers in peer-reviewed journals and discovered two catalysts, for which he received the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2004 and the Paul Rylander Award in 2006. Rothenberg also invented a method for monitoring pollutants in water, and co-founded the companies Sorbisense and Yellow Diesel. In 2007 he was voted 'teacher of the year' by the chemistry students, and his textbook on catalysis was a Wiley-VCH bestseller in 2008. His latest invention is a cheap biodegradable plastic resin made from 100% plant-based materials.

See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afggRfw0-Ko

The ability to map the functional connectivity of distributed circuits, and to assess how this connectivity changes over time, will be facilitated by methods that shed enable mapping at connectivity at the mesoscopic level focusing on specific sub-circuits, cell types, or projection pathways. In this talk I will describe two approaches using high-resolution blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) of the awake mouse brain: (1) Distributed functional responses evoked by optical activation of neurons expressing the light gated ion channel channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) and (2) spontaneous coherent fluctuations of the BOLD signal across functionally connected brain circuits. I will present the results of mapping and characterizing distributed network responses using optogenetic and intrinsic connectivity fMRI in the healthy brain and show some initial results into efforts in the lab to understand the impact of developmental disorders on mesoscopic brain organization.