James R. Heath is the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech; professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA; and director of the National Cancer Institute's Nanosystems Biology Cancer Center, headquartered at Cal Tech.
His lab works on a variety of research projects in two general areas-solid-state quantum physics, materials science and basic surface science; and fundamental biology and translational medicine with an emphasis on oncology and advancing cancer treatments.
Heath's honors include being named to the Forbes list of seven most powerful innovators and the Scientific American 50 Award, in addition to earning the Spiers Memorial Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Raymond and Bevery Sackler Prize in Physical Sciences, the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology and the Jules Springer Prize for Applied Physics, among others. He also is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
He will discuss his cancer research during the general lecture. "We have been working over the past several years to develop quantitative approaches towards following the response of cancer patients to various targeted therapies, including therapies in which the patient's own immune system is engineered to fight the disease, " he said. "Many of these technologies are centered around highly multiplexed, quantitative proteomics measurements at the single cell level. I will discuss how the use of these tools in the clinic is providing deep insights into how patients respond to therapies. These tools are also allowing us to begin formulating some basic questions in cancer biology with the framework of exact thermodynamic models."
During his afternoon research talk, "I will discuss a variety of nanosystems we have developed and studied for efficiently controlling energy conversion, using physical properties that uniquely emerge at the nanoscale. A major challenge associated with such nanotechnologies is that the intrinsically high surface-to-volume ratio of such structures means that surface chemistry can play a dominant role. I will discuss approaches we have taken towards understanding and controlling nanoscale surface chemistry. In particular, I will discuss the use of graphene templating, which allows us to capture and study weakly bound surface adsorbates, and the influence those adsorbates have on the electronic properties of the underlying nanostructures."
Heath received a B.Sc. degree in 1984 (Baylor) and his Ph.D. in Chemistry (Rice) in 1988 where he was the principal student involved in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of C60 and the fullerenes. Heath was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1988-91, and on the Technical Staff at IBM Watson Labs from 1991-93. In 1994 he joined the faculty at UCLA. He founded the California NanoSystems Institute in 2000 and served as its Director until moving to Caltech. Heath has investigated quantum phase transitions, and he has developed architectures, devices, and circuits for molecular electronics. His group has recently been applying their advances on nanoelectronics circuitry toward addressing problems in cancer.
For more information about the event, contact Professor Katarzyna Slowinska at 985-5815 or katarzyna.slowinska@csulb.edu.
