Annual Report 2007 - The Australian Nanotechnology Network

The outcome of our discussion and practical application of THz QCL imaging for experiments
was the submission of a paper to the conference: WORLDCOMP'06 and the journal of
“Computer Vision and Image Understanding”. This project accomplished in Cambridge
University also consists of one important chapter of my thesis. It is worth noting that as this
paper and the respective imaging processing work were rather lengthy, a lot of time was spent on
improving it and this has somehow hindered our progress of processing more bio-molecular data
as we originally planned. It is also in hope that we will have more cooperation between Adelaide
University, Australia, and Cambridge University, UK.
Yours sincerely, Ms Xiaoxia (Sunny) Yin
The University of Adelaide, SA
Ms Tara Schiller (Queensland Institute of Technology) – visit to the
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA
Tara is a Postgraduate student and her area of research interest is nanotechnology and
biotechnology. PhD title \"Synthesis and characterisation of hybrid gold/polymer nanoparticles
for application in bioassays\"
The main aim of her project is to synthesise hybrid gold polymer nanoparticles that have been
encoded with a molecular barcode that gives rise to a SERS signal.She will coat SERS tagged
nanoparticles with polymers with complex architecture so that ligands can be attached for protein
microarray work. This is a novel technique that allows the ligand to attach readily to a binding
site on the polymer. This work aims to improve on existing nanoparticle coating technologies to
produce an improved detection strategy for proteinbioassays. This project will also assess the
role of polymer structures in the performance of these hybrid materials in bioassays, and
compare and evaluate the performance of thepolymer coated nanoparticles with SiO2 coated
nanoparticles. At the end ofher time at UCSB she hope to have a further journal paper ready for
submission to J. Amer. Chem. Soc that will detail the results obtained from this visit.
Her application was supported by her supervisor A/Prof Peter Fredericks and by Prof Craig
Hawker from the University of California in Santa Barbara.
Trip Summary – Tara Louise SCHILLER
The opportunity came about at the end of 2006 to apply for the RACI O’Donnell prize as well as
the ARCNN travel fellowship. I was awarded both to return to UCSB for a second extended stay
as a visitor of Professor Hawker again (my initial trip was in 2006) as part of my PhD project.
My thesis centres around labelling gold nanoparticles with a SERS active tag, encapsulate these
particles with a polymer for stabilisation. The polymer coating can then be used for attaching
linkers for biomolecules, developing on existing technology.
I visited the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), University of California, Santa Barbara
(UCSB), where Professor Hawker is the Director. Professor Hawker’s research has focused on
the interface between organic and polymer chemistry with emphasis on the design, synthesis, and
application of well-defined macromolecular structures in biotechnology, microelectronics and
surface science. He holds 25 U.S. Patents, has co-authored over 200 papers in the areas of
nanotechnology, materials science and chemistry and is listed as one of the Top 100 most cited
chemists worldwide over the last decade (1992-2002). He is currently considered to be among
the top two or three polymer chemists in the world.
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