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NORTH AMERICAN Newsline JANUARY 21, 2022 | The Indian Eye 30

Poornima Padmanabhan gets

CAreer award

OUR BUREAU mers, electrochemistry, and alterna-
tive energy resources.
New York
Prior to coming to RIT, she
hemical engineer Poornima was a post-doctoral researcher at
Padmanabhan, who is search- Cornell University and received
Cing for the origins of life based its Alice H. Cook and Constance
on minute systems of molecules, has E. Cook Award, given by the Of-
received a National Science Founda- fice of Faculty Development and
tion Faculty Early Career Develop- Diversity for commitment to wom-
ment (CAREER) award. An assis- en’s issues and improving the cli-
tant professor chemical engineering mate for women at the university.
at Rochester Institute of Technology Padmanabhan continues to
(RIT), Padmanabhan was given the be an advocate for gender di-
five-year, $478,476 award to discover versity and increasing the pipe-
how chiral structures—or mirror-im- line of students in STEM de-
age, entangled molecules—function, gree programs, the release said.
according to an RIT press release. The CAREER program is an
This process is essential to un- NSF-wide activity that offers awards in
derstanding how different cell types support of junior faculty who exempli-
are formulated in biochemical devel- chiral structures and the reason the amazing things are observed.” fy the role of teacher-scholars through
opment, the Rochester, New York- work is very exciting is we don’t know At RIT, she is co-director of the outstanding research, excellent edu-
based private research university how these phenomena happen,” said Computational Materials Research cation, and the integration of educa-
said. The concepts can provide in- Padmanabhan. Nucleus Lab which researches devel- tion and research within the context
formation about how synthetic ma- In chemical systems where com- opment of “extreme” strength poly- of the mission of their organizations.
terials can be further developed for plex interactions lead to formation of
use in the pharmaceutical industry, molecular structures at a multitude of
in agriculture or food analysis, and in length scales, chirality may or may not
the development of novel materials result in each of those length scales.
to enhance sensing and imaging ap- “We cannot predict when some-
plications, it said. thing will be frustrated or when
something will be amplified. That is
Padmanabhan received the what we are trying to discover with
this work,” she said.
award from the NSF’s division Understanding when and how
of Materials research for her chirality is transferred from the
smallest to the largest length scale
study titled “Chirality and poly- will be explored by studying the un-

mer thermodynamics: frustra- derlying thermodynamic principles
and interrogating the molecular-lev-
tion and amplification.” Chiral- el detail. A thermodynamic under-
ity means “handed-ness” and standing of conditions when such
transfer is amplified, or conditions
anything in nature that can be when such transfer is hindered, re-
identified as right- or left-hand- main unknown, but through discov-
ery, the information can be used to
ed are essentially mirror images. build artificial systems that mimic
biology for engineering applications,
Polymers are long molecules she added.
made from smaller entities that “One cool part about chirality
are bonded together. When these which was a total surprise—and we
smaller entities are chiral, they form still don’t know why this is true—
much larger chiral polymers, such as many of the biological molecules in
proteins which become the building our body are all of one type of chi-
blocks of life systems. In turn, hun- rality,” said Padmanabhan, who has
dreds or thousands of polymers can been at RIT since 2017.
come together to form even larger “At some point early on, during
structures. evolution, something about the ther-
“We can think about how pro- modynamics of the system led us
teins fold, how life originated, we down this one single path. We don’t
can think about how biology forms know why. It’s so crazy how these

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