January 26, 2010
Angela Belcher. Download image.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The recipient of the 2010 University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" winner Angela Belcher, Ph.D., will deliver a free, public lecture at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11 in the Alys Stephens Center Jemison Concert Hall, 1200 10th Ave. South. For more details, call 205-996-7190.
The Germehausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Belcher will lecture on "Engineering Organisms as Building Block Materials for Energy and Electronics."
Belcher's research is focused on understanding and using the process by which nature makes materials in order to design new hybrid, organic and inorganic materials. It has been published in numerous scientific journals, including Science and Nature, and has been described in popular magazines such as Time magazine and Scientific American.
"Organisms have been making exquisite inorganic materials for more than 500 million years," says Belcher, who won the "Genius Grant" in 2004. "Although these materials have many desired physical properties such as strength regularity and environmental benign processing, the types of materials that organisms have evolved to work with are limited. However, there are many properties of living systems that potentially could be harnessed by researchers to make advanced technologies that are smarter, more adaptable and synthesized to be compatible with the environment.
"One approach to designing future technologies that have some of the properties that living organisms use so well is to evolve organisms to work with a more diverse set of building blocks," she says. "These materials could be designed to address many scientific and technological problems in electronics, military, medicine and energy applications. Examples include a virus-enabled, rechargeable lithium ion battery we recently built that has many improved properties over conventional batteries and materials for solar and display technologies."
Belcher earned her bachelor's degree in creative studies in 1991 and her doctorate in chemistry in 1997 from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize and an additional $5,000 for expenses, brings internationally renowned scholars in the arts and sciences to UAB to present a public lecture, attend a dinner in their honor and participate in campus activities. The prize is made possible through an endowment established by Caroline F. and Charles W. Ireland in 1984 and was first awarded in 1992.
About UAB
Known for its innovative and interdisciplinary approach to education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is an internationally renowned research university and academic medical center and the state of Alabama's largest employer. For more information, please visit www.uab.edu.