Invited Speakers
Dr. Yuankai Huang
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, 蜜桃导航
Applications of Nanotechnology in Environmental Sensors
Continuous monitoring of nutrients, metals, and emerging contaminants is increasingly
important for protecting water quality, optimizing treatment processes, and enabling
data-driven environmental management. However, conventional laboratory analyses are
often costly, time-consuming, and unable to capture rapid changes in complex environmental
systems. Nanotechnology provides new opportunities to develop compact, sensitive,
and field-deployable sensors for real-time monitoring. This presentation will highlight
our research on nanomaterial-enabled electrochemical sensors, with an emphasis on
solid-contact ion-selective electrodes for monitoring environmentally relevant ions.
Nanostructured materials, functional polymers, and antifouling interfaces are incorporated
into sensor architectures to improve signal stability, ion transport, selectivity,
and resistance to biofouling.
Machine learning is further integrated with sensor development to identify relationships among molecular properties, material characteristics, fabrication conditions, and sensor performance. Interpretable models can reveal the factors governing sensitivity, selectivity, detection limits, and long-term stability, thereby guiding material selection and reducing experimental trial and error. These concepts are also being extended to microplastic monitoring in drinking water systems. Our emerging approach combines acoustofluidic enrichment and size- or density-based separation with nanomaterial-engineered electrochemical interfaces. Voltammetric and impedance responses generated by interactions between plastic particles and sensor surfaces are interpreted using physics-informed machine learning to estimate microplastic mass concentration while accounting for particle properties, water chemistry, recovery efficiency, and prediction uncertainty. Together, these efforts demonstrate how nanomaterials, electrochemical sensing, and data-driven design can support intelligent environmental monitoring.
Dr. Eden E. L. Tanner
Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Mississippi
Bioinspired Ionic Liquids: Leveraging Chemistry to Achieve Targeted Drug Delivery
One of the major challenges facing intravenous nanoparticle administration is off-target
accumulation, where the vast majority of nanoparticles do not arrive at their intended
destination. Biocompatible ionic liquids (ILs) have been shown to have tunable interactions
with biomolecules including proteins and are prone to rearrangement on charged surfaces.
We show that this can be exploited to design ionic liquids as polymeric coatings,
which can direct the nanoparticle to 鈥渉itchhike鈥� onto various blood components in
whole blood, which then redirects biodistribution in vivo. This talk will discuss
the development of ionic liquids for efficacious nanoparticle drug delivery, elucidate
the lessons learnt thus far, describe the many challenges to come, and highlight the
opportunities that arise at the intersection of physical chemistry and bioengineering.
Dr. Eden Tanner completed her undergraduate degree with Honors in Advanced Science as a Chemistry major at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She earned her doctorate in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford and completed her Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University working with Samir Mitragotri. Dr. Tanner joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi in 2020, and from July 1, 2026 is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The Tanner Lab works at the interface of Chemistry and Bioengineering with a focus on using ionic liquids to solve problems in nanoparticle drug delivery.