Brown University School of Engineering Professor Robert Hurt will be honored at a tribute session of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization’s (SNO) annual meeting November 8-10. The conference will be held at Providence’s Omni Hotel and hosted by the University of Rhode Island.
Each year at its annual gathering, one person from the scientific society is selected to be honored. Former and current students, postdocs, collaborators and colleagues of Hurt are expected to attend both the tribute session on Nov. 9, and the plenary talk Hurt will offer immediately prior titled, “Enabling Nanotechnology Development through Research on Stability, Scaling, and Safety.”
Expected to be among those speakers paying tribute to Hurt are Po-Yen Chen, former postdoctoral researcher in the Hurt lab and now Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland; Brown Engineering Professor Anubhav Tripathi; Brown Senior Research Engineer Zachary Saleeba, who is also a Ph.D. student in the Hurt lab; Zhongying Wang Sc.M. ’15 Ph.D. ’16, professor at Southern University of Science and Technology in China and former Ph.D. student of Hurt; current Ph.D. student Ann Yang; University of Rhode Island Professor Arjit Bose; University of Maine Professor Onur Apul; and Arizona State University Professor Francois Perreault.
Created in 2012, SNO is the only permanent professional science and engineering organization devoted solely to nanotechnology and, in particular, how nanotechnology relates to sustainability. SNO is part of the U.S. Science and Engineering Expo and is a dedicated network of professionals involved in research, education, and responsibility toward nanotechnology.
Hurt received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1987 and, before joining Brown, held positions in the Central Research and Development Division of Bayer AG in Leverkusen, Germany, and at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. He served as Director of the NIH-supported Superfund Research Program Center at Brown, and is on the editorial advisory board of the Royal Society Journal Environmental Science Nano. He was named the 2017 Graphene Award of the Year winner at the European Advanced Materials Congress. From 2013-2018, Hurt was Editor-in-Chief of the materials science and nanotechnology journal CARBON. He was Technical Program Chair for the international conference, Carbon2004, and that same year received the Graffin Lecture Award of the American Carbon Society. Hurt also received the Silver Medal of the Combustion Institute in Naples, Italy in 1996 and an NSF CAREER Award, also in 1996. In 2013 he received the Charles E. Pettinos Award for “recent outstanding research accomplishment in the science and/or technology of carbon materials.”
Hurt’s research focuses on nanomaterials and their applications and implications for human health and the environment. Current research thrusts include the biological response to graphene-family nanomaterials, mechanisms of carbon nanotube uptake and toxicity, nano-silver and nano-copper transformations in the natural environment, safe material design, and the assembly and folding of graphene to make three-dimensional architectures for barrier and encapsulation technologies, and as electrodes and catalyst supports.