 Good evening to all Korean alumni based in Seoul and other parts of the country and Good morning to those joining from the United States this marks the 24th global society talk and Tonight, we're very pleased to have a very distinguished speaker who is well-renowned professor and and and our friend Dean Mike Solomon from Ann Arbor and Before he gives his update on campus and his talk, I would like to invite Dr. Jung Guhyeon the president of our Korean Alumni Association to give his brief welcome remarks Dr. Jung. Thank you First of all, let me thank Dean Solomon for Venturing to give a talk Good morning and good evening So I also like to thank Michelle and the staff of the Reckham for preparing this seminar When we first talked about this seminar, I was a bit concerned because the topic is sounds to me very technical and I was wondering, you know, whether there will be a lot of interest in such a technical topic You know why butterflies are blue? And but that's like a material science topic, right? I'm looking forward to hear what how Butterfly is linked with the material But I'm glad, you know, more than about 50 Alumni members registered for this event, although The number doesn't show 50 yet and I like to thank our alumni members for their interest in participation in this event and I look forward to learning a few things about The topic as well as the situation in Annaba. So once again, thanks very much Mike Thank you. Dr. Jung and I would like to introduce Dean Mike Solomon and just give his brief bio Mike Solomon is the Dean of Reckham Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Graduate Studies at University of Michigan He's a professor of chemical engineering and a professor of macro molecular science and engineering And he has been a member of the Michigan faculty since 1997 from January 2013 to June 2017 he served as an associate Dean of Reckham where he focused on academic programs and initiatives including working with the school's faculty and cross campus initiatives on graduate student mentoring in addition to his work with programs in engineering and the physical sciences Mike has received numerous awards in recognition for his excellence as a professor and member of the university community He has been a recipient of the NSF career awards 3M's non-tenured faculty award and the 2011 Soft matter lectureship from the Royal Society of Chemists chemistry is journal soft matter He's a fellow of the American Association of the advancement of science and of American physical society He received his bachelor of science in chemical engineering and economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1990 and his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of California Berkeley in 1996 Now I would like to welcome Dean Mike Solomon who will give us campus update first and Commence his talk Mike Thank you so much. Why J I first like to begin by thanking you YJ Chang and Dr. Q and June and all of you from the Alumni Association for the chance to join you this morning We're a small group and I'm really that's makes the possibility to have some dialogue in exchange I've left plenty of time for question and answer and I am planning to give a light talk I hopefully the title of the talk doesn't doesn't warn anybody off But I think any anybody that's interested in learning more about what's going on at the University of Michigan on campus And then also is interested in color and where it comes from. I think you'll enjoy my light presentation today You know at the University of Michigan, I have a number of roles I have both Dean of the Graduate School and also a chemical engineering faculty member And I'm really delighted to be able to address you in both those capacities today So I'm gonna try to share my screen and then I'll start with a brief campus update So just be this is the part where we always hope that it works. Well, just a quick question there I've seen Michelle nod her head. So looks like we're we're good So let me start with with our greetings from from Ann Arbor. Let me just make sure my keys are working here one second Great. Okay. So greetings from Ann Arbor. I wanted to start with a campus update Before talking about Some some science topics after that that we'll have time for questions on both topics So my update will be somewhat from the perspective of our university as many graduate students I'm not I'm focusing on our graduate students really because of my role and also because they're central to the university's mission You know, they work on cutting-edge research. They teach our undergraduates They are as alumni go on to great careers as scholars artists Public servants engineers and and more and Rackham is the home for these graduate students for and for research based education at the University of Michigan I know that some of you may not be Rackham students or you may not have a full sense of the graduate student School's role in the university, which also has changed greatly Since since over the years Rackham is the hub for grad ed at Michigan There's more than 8,500 students enrolled in Rackham's doctoral Masters and certificate programs and they are in every UM school and college from social work to engineering to business And through the public policy. So if you're in those schools that very often you're a Rackham graduate and especially if you're a PhD student We partner with graduate faculty and programs across the campus to invent advance excellence in all aspects of graduate education and try to create a vibrant and diverse student community We provide resources to help our students with professional development, mentoring, counseling, emergency funding and more And if you were an undergraduate at UM, you likely at some point were taught by a Rackham student because they frequently work as teaching assistants Before I tell you about what is happening at Arbor I did want to take a moment to acknowledge just the extraordinarily difficult circumstances And really collective pain we've all experienced over the course of the last 12 months Not just at the university, not just at Michigan, but across the whole globe We've grieved the devastating impacts of the pandemic and virus on our families and our friends and the places we call home And there's been a tremendous loss of life and these impacts are felt all over the globe I also want to recognize the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities of color in the US We continue to navigate the challenge of that pandemic while at the same time We're holding hope that vaccination and other control measures will progressively bring it under control I also wanted to say at the same time, the US has been undergoing a racial reckoning as we confront the killing of black Americans and other people of color At the hands of the police We've also been confronting a rise in xenophobia, racism and aggression directed at Asians, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Including a recent mass shooting in Atlanta And we all feel anger and pain at the frequency of racial violence in the US And I know this in particular this week has been a very challenging one for for these reasons So I think it's very correct to say that these events have affected every member of the University of Michigan community You know through all these challenges We are still proud that our research labs are open That our academic medical center is seeing its full complement of patients And that all our courses have been offered albeit mostly in online formats At the same time, we know we have students who have not been able to travel to Ann Arbor for their studies Perhaps you know some of them and are pursuing their studies or their research from home or even elsewhere And although the challenges with racial injustice persist We believe that the situation at least with respect to the pandemic is slowly improving In Michigan nearly 40 of adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine So just for a moment turning ahead to what we're thinking the next academic year will be like We have a certain amount of optimism The University recently announced a preliminary plan to return to campus for the fall term With most classes outside of large lecture classes being taught in person This plan presumes that all faculty graduate student instructors and staff who wish to be vaccinated Will have access to the vaccines before the fall semester starts And we appear to be on track for that and then also a significant proportion of students will have been vaccinated as well And we're creating incentive programs and ways to make it easy for students to be vaccinated Even now before they leave, before the end of the of the current term So under this plan research opportunities are going to continue to expand so that students at all levels of study graduate and undergraduate Will have opportunities to engage in their research activities under what will seem like pre-pandemic conditions Residents halls will be open at nearly 80 capacity And most students faced in services such as libraries, museums, study spaces Sports facilities, other programs Will have expanded in-person opportunities But we're still going to be including remote options since we understand that Different students and different faculty and staff are at different places with how they're how they're Navigating the pandemic U.M. Athletics just for a moment They're planning to welcome fans into the stands to ensure on our our Wolverine teams at the big house at Crystal Center and other venues As allowed by public health measures That it will be in place at that time So this return to the campus plan aligns with university's goal Of an innovative and responsible return to in-person education And a residential campus experience It should be closer to one like we all love and remember About u.m. In town halls with students. I've acknowledged the uncertainty about the pandemic's progression But also stressed The values of the value of our shared goal of moving forward to take advantage of the of the on-campus life of the university As soon as we can do that safely So I want to take before I one what in one more update about the campus I just wanted to take a brief moment to focus on rackham graduate students for a moment I know that Uh, you know, so many of you have graduate degrees and I think it's a good example of how university of michigan Supports its students in general at this moment as I reflect on the last year and look ahead to the next I'm really aware that the pathways our graduate students needed to take or they did take I have have proven to be much more difficult than They would have been in in earlier years And it's been made more complex by the fact that they play these multiple roles at the university as instructor teacher Researcher scholar and student I think these uh, these challenges have been particularly intense for international students There are currently about 250 south korean students enrolled in rackham programs Um, the majority of these students are here in an arbor although a few of them have traveled back home Um, and they they're pursuing their studies, uh there during the pandemic I've actually met virtually with korean students in both places in the last year I wanted to describe um, I'll describe more in a moment But I'm quite optimistic that newly admitted korean students will be able to join us here in an arbor for their studies next year The pandemic has required new ways to support all rackham students in their studies And I'll use them as an example of the of the supports that the university has provided In response to the disruption of the last year and in planning for fall 21 We've been listening intently to the voices of our community and I have a few Kind of supports that we've offered listed on the slide here We've adjusted our grading policies in the last year to include satisfactory unsatisfactory options We've also extended our academic deadlines for candidacy and refining your dissertation As a way to be more flexible and also to risk or support students' well-being and success We worked with all 105 doctoral programs to offer these students affected by the pandemic Additional time and funding to complete their degrees since many of them didn't have access to labs, collections, fieldwork sites at the height of the pandemic Over the last year, we also provided very significant emergency funds over 1.2 million dollars For students for a variety of reasons including those who were stranded away from an arbor as the pandemic began And for other unexpected costs This was especially important for international students who aren't able to access other funding sources because of the nature of their visas The U.S. government also provided some emergency funds for U.S. citizens and permanent residents And Rackham was sure to extend the same kind of funding to international students So that they would receive the same categories of support during the pandemic And also last summer Rackham worked with many dozens of incoming international students To allow them to start remotely from wherever they were located Since consulates and visas were closed We allowed them to draw on their fellowships and also even hold research assistantships and teaching assistantships to allow them to start their students Just studies just like any other So I think while looking ahead like while many international students are likely to face continued difficulty Getting to campus in the fall due to due to backlogs and visa Processing that consulates around the world and other travel restrictions I'm pretty pleased to very pleased to report that it's unlikely that this is going to be the case I believe for Korean students our international center support Reports that our U.S. embassy in Seoul is is is making and keeping visa appointments and there's There's less travel restrictions for students arriving from South Korea So I'll of course be continuing to monitor the situation For all countries Because it really is critical that our international students know how much the university Is is welcoming them to pursue their studies at at all degree levels undergraduate masters and doctoral University of Michigan So to wrap up at this part of the remark Let me say that I am quite optimistic that are that are long journey through this period of uncertain disruption Will be hopefully concluding and will be moving into that space in the next academic year So I'm going to that's that's the update. I'll be happy at the conclusion of the talk to to take I'm gonna have additional discussion about it and now I like to Turn to our next topic, which is a light one And it's really designed. It's a talk about science and engineering and it also engages Rackham rackham students as well since the individuals that who have collaborated with me in this research Are all rackham students and I think this will be of interest to anybody that Enjoys nature and enjoys color and enjoys science So I'll be trying to give a little bit of a why As to why butterflies are blue and then a little bit of why that might matter In terms of things that we care about for human society and the public good like new materials and medical treatments So to begin with I just like to You can kind of take a step back here and think about color in the natural world So I have a few examples here. So all of you know about carrots. This is a purple cauliflower that In the in the spring that we are in in the fall that we'll we'll have in our family These are examples of of natural colors coloration available And that in the in the in the living in living systems Those are produced by pigmentation. So it turns out that That those colors are the same ones that for example that make fall leaves Turn orange and red their carotenoid molecules and the way they work is they basically block out the sunlight at certain wavelengths Certain at certain colors and not others and that's how you get color that color as opposed to a different one Another mechanism of color in the natural world is bioluminescence If you have fireflies in your part of the world, we do every summer here in michigan. They emit light Also a lot of marine organisms emit light and even bacterial light. So sometimes if you're walking along the ocean at certain times of the year And you see the surf it'll it'll have a color as well. And that's another biological coloration mechanism The kind of color that butterflies have is is different. It's called structural color And I want to introduce that to you in the natural world If you see blues or greens, they are often not produced by pigmentation They are produced by this different mechanism. It's very hard to make blues In greens and by another mechanism and structural color is the one that I'd like to speak about today One thing I'll say is that you know, we I've talked on the left the pigmentation that is Color in plants. So you might ask the color. Well, what about color in animals and often for example that color in animals Comes from the fact that they actually eat they can't produce it themselves But they eat the vegetable matter that has those colors So it's the reason why shrimp have the color that they do or or flamingos are pink Is because they eat plant matter that has that color. They don't produce it themselves but the the blues and greens that i'm talking about those are produced by A variety of different organisms and they tend to be animals because it's actually a very complicated mechanism by which it's produced And it's not chemical. That's what's really it's called structural color The pigmentation comes from certain chemicals that interact with the sunlight Absorb some wavelengths don't absorb others or biolescence is a chemical reaction and that there's an enzyme that produces light structural color Is from the arrangement of microscopic building blocks in particular beautiful patterns That you can only see under a microscope. So now I've brought back the picture of a butterfly. This is a morpho butterfly It's a particular species that has a brilliant blue color that That is often used in an example of structural color If I were to take a microscope and there's more than one microscope you can use there's You can use an optical microscope kind of like what we've used it at all the way, you know from from grade school up into college To that uses light or we can use what's called an electron microscope which can Observe even smaller features as small as a nanometer So my scales here a human hair is about 100 microns and I'll use that What I'll use that as a scale when we talk about it. So those blue Kind of fibers that you see there Each one of those is about the width of a human hair If you then take your electron microscope and look inside one of those fibers You'll see these other ordered structures that are on the right hand side of this image They're these kind of very ordered arrays And they are About a thousand times smaller than that of a human hair Not a hundred microns about a hundred nanometers, which is a thousand times smaller than a human hair So the blue that you're seeing in those butterflies and this is where I'll talk about how this connects them to engineering is From this very pattern if you like pattern of structures That the animal has produced this case the butterfly On this scale that's a thousand times smaller than a human hair And that's the key point that we're going to try to investigate and understand in the laboratory as we move forward So where else do you see structural color once you know to look for these blues and greens you can really see them everywhere There's other kinds of butterflies. Here's a butterfly that shows a green structural color Many beetle beetles show iridescence Peacock wings are structural color and if you look inside these and this has been done By by biologists if you look deep inside them with a microscope You'll see these very beautiful patterns That are on this scale of a thousand times smaller than a human hair Another kind of organism are squid and octopus and I'll have more to say about them They also have this iridescent sheen that they use for camouflage There's many birds in our part of the world. We have starlings. So anytime you see like a shimmer Of color often there's not it's not only just blue and green But also as you turn your head The color will itself change. These are all properties of this kind of color The last one that we'll use to try to understand what's going on here is opal gems for those of you that have Have seen an opal gem This is again like a brilliant color that changes as you rotate the gem That is also structural color. So it's not a living example of structural color It's actually produced in the natural world through geological processes So these are all examples of structural color and they're all related to those patterns that are very small microscopic scales Let me take a minute minute to describe about why we might care about this From the point of view of engineering or or being people. So it's wonderful to look at in the natural world But why might might we want to do this to try to make this ourselves? As humans and the the reason for it is that there's some problems with the paints and coatings that we use in art To paint our houses to paint our homes Which is that they fade over time The reason they fade is that they're I talked earlier about how coloration comes from chemicals Well chemicals can get damaged by sunlight sunlight is amazingly strong for anybody that has you know Well painted house or uh had something sit out in the sun for a long period of time You know it changes color. I have two examples here one of a of a paint Kind of sample over 36 months that changed its color Due due to sunlight and another is an artwork that actually was faded due to sunlight as well Wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it be environmentally sustainable if we had ways to paint to cover things with with color to make things colorful In which they didn't fade and one of the things about structural color is that it's not really based on chemistry It's based on those patterns those very Uh intricate beautiful patterns and those patterns actually are very resilient. They're not due to chemistry They're due to actually how the how the volume of material is positioned And so the idea is that um if we could use structural color in certain applications We would have sustainable color. We could have a color that would be very durable So that motivates me as a chemical engineer to try to understand how this is done in the natural world Can we do it as people and can we use it for a product? So I'd like to take uh Now kind of dive in and talk about how we're going to try to do this in the lab So I've talked about the scale of the human hair quite a bit in this talk so far It's about 100 microns in size You can remember that number or you can just think about a human hair And I'll try to give all the length scales that we're talking about as some ratio of of the width of a human hair So we're going to take building blocks that we can synthesize in our lab That are about a thousand times smaller than that of a human hair They can have unusual shapes. They might look like needles like I'm showing in the bottom left image or they might be spheres The important point is that there's this large range of length scales between molecules That are millions of times smaller than a human hair And the human hair itself and this middle scale is the scale that we saw in nature Where the structural color was produced So if we can build structures ourselves as people in this range Then we have a hope that we might be able to produce structural color just like it's found in the natural world So that's going to be our strategy These particles have a name. Uh, they're called colloids It's maybe not a name that you're familiar with but I'm going to go to actually argue in the next slide That you use colloids every day and they are all around you. They're actually very benign And maybe as a good example of that I think it's on the next slide here A colloid is uh, basically milk For example, or anything that looks cloudy often is made from colloids a muddy river Um, we'll also often have collides in it. These again are particles that are super small Again, a thousand times smaller than a human hair and when they're kind of in solution like this There's enough of them that they'll block light. So the reason why your milk looks milky Like it looks that you can't actually see through it is because there's all these colloids moving around Uh, and they block the light and they block the light in a way that just doesn't give you any interesting color And what we're going to be trying to do is we're going to try to all organize those colloids in a way Where they only block certain wavelengths of light and amplify others Now if I were to take a microscope and uh look at milk What you would see is on the right hand side here. This is a picture of colloids It's not actually milk, but it's like, uh, it's something that we can look at in the lab with a microscope Each of these particles is in this case is about a hundred times smaller than a human hair And when I start this movie, you'll see what actually what milk looks like. I hope this movie will work And it is I think it is so right now you can see Hopefully it's coming across over to you in korea That uh, there's a bunch of particles there and they're kind of all jiggling around moving around randomly This is something uh, that was uh, uh That uh, it's called brownie in motion It was actually discovered by a scientist named brown and explained theoretically by einstein and uh, Einstein received a noble prize for understanding why those molecules jiggle around like they do And it's because they're being bombarded by even smaller molecules of the of the solid of the liquid So milk is mostly water, but it has these collides in it. In this case, they're droplets of fat and protein and they move around and They're there at a concentration that makes them look like like they do So that's uh, that is what we'll be talking about going forward. We're going to use that to make try to make patterns But before we do that, I wanted to address the part of the talk Where I spoke about medical device treatments Well, there's another organism that is the same size As collides and those are bacteria and bacteria, you know, can make us very sick There's many ways and many kinds of organisms that can invade us and bacteria one of them And it's what we use antibiotics to uh, to try to treat One of the large sources of of um, hospital Um hospitalizations in the united states are due to infected medical devices and they're often infected by bacteria If you look on the surface of say a dialysis catheter Or a catheter that you might have in your heart These can be infected with bacteria And they end up looking very much like those solutions Did I just showed the bacteria are about the same size and they become Absorbed onto catheter surfaces at very high concentrations And they're very resistant to antibiotics. So I'm showing here A model of a of a catheter in the body on the left The central image is now zoomed in on the catheter with an electron microscope. And then if I zoom in again Down to this scale that's about a hundred times smaller than a human hair You see a collection of bacteria that look very much like those particles. I was showing you earlier Our lab has been for many years collaborating with medical doctors to try to understand What this is this is a biofilm. It's called these bacteria when they get together like this. They're called biofilms And sometimes you can actually grow them to the size that you can see them This is a biofilm on an artificial catheter And we've been developing methods to control that based on the fact that they these bacteria have the same properties as colloids And if you zoom in on biofilms On the top left is what a biofilm might look to your to your eye On an infected medical device that would be in One's body if you zoom in on one scale You can see that it covers the device and this is now micro these are micro images from our lab And then if you zoom in again, now you see these individual particles That are colonizing the device they look very much like the same particles that we saw in milk And you can zoom in on them and see their individual structure And then if you use an electron microscope on the left, you can see then the individual cells So these colloids obey physical laws that we as engineers understand And one of the treatments that we've been developing is heat In in conjunction with the antibiotics is we've learned that as if you apply heat to biofilms on Devices like you might be able to do by gently warming a catheter surface You can actually Destabilize the bacteria you could both kill them and actually break off those biofilms from the device And clear off the device medical device infection This is showing now temperatures as you heat up 37 degrees C is the normal body temperature 45 degrees C is a range in which many cancer treatments operate And 60 degrees is close to what a human can write at the limit of what a human can tolerate um The bottom image I draw your attention to the green cells are healthy bacteria and the red cells are Dead bacteria and so we've been working with treatment strategies that supplement antibiotics by Using physical methods that are based on these colloid structures that are the same kinds of structures that are in milk And that will be in the that are relevant to structural color But using them to understand treatments in in in the body One thing about everything that I've spoken about to this point Is that those little points of light you can see is that they're they're not ordered they look random And uh, that is actually what we're going to try to change now in the last part of the talk And to do that, I'd like to just talk a little bit about order versus disorder and to do that i'm going to use Um, uh cannonballs as an example though you could use billiard balls are marbles Here's two images the top one is a disordered stack of cannonballs And the bottom is an ordered stack of cannonballs And you can see they look very different same number of cannonballs But one of them is stacked in what you can think of as a crystal arrangement and the other is just a pile Well, it turns out that that's the difference between disorder and order and for order will typically call those crystals And the analogy to what you know to crystals that we have in our homes is is is very good So if you look for example at silica, which you can make Is what quartz is made out of and also what window glass is made out of If you look at the molecular scale quartz is ordered And glass is disordered And if you look at natural quartz, you can see when it grows it has these crystalline shapes If you look at natural natural glass, it doesn't have any crystal shapes. It doesn't have any sharp edges. It's disordered So everything that I've shown you about colloids at this point has been disordered The bio the biofilms were disordered bacteria. The milk was disordered colloids The key to structural order I will argue is in To structural color is in the order and to do that we can take a clue from opal gems On the left is an opal gem That is of two kinds One's called common opal and the other is called Precious opal and you can see this thing that is the dull gray That is common opal And if you look microscopically you see this disordered structure And then the center part the brilliant blue is opal gem Or precious opal and that has the ordered structure that you see in the bottom So the key to producing those Blue butterflies is to make an ordered structure Like in the bottom right bottom right image and not a disordered structure like in the top left And this picture of a gem really shows that beautifully. That's what we need to do And so that's what we went into lab and did so this is now Taking those colloids that were originally disordered and now we've made them ordered. So they're still jiggling around They're still undergoing brownie emotional like Einstein predicted they should But they've now been organized into these configurations And we over the years have developed three or four different ways to do this That range from applying electric fields To using gravity cleverly or also to designing forces between these colloids I won't go into those today except to say that that versatile method allows us to make these ordered structures And then when we go into the lab This is now in our laboratory. Um, this is a graduate student. Tenu Lu that did this work You see the same kinds of brilliant structural color These specimens if they were not ordered they would just look milky white like milk But once you order them they have these brilliant colors and the colors change with angle just like you would see in an opal gem So I have just three more slides to go and I'd like to take one more step Which is to ask the question. Can we make these in a way that the color would change with time? So this was inspired by this beautiful video from a marine biologist that I'll just show a few seconds of It's gonna I'll start it in just a moment. It's going to show a rock I just want you to watch that rock. It's what rock in the sea just watch the rock for a while And uh, we'll see what beautiful things Oh, I don't know Now I know So hopefully you can see that I'll stop the video the octopus is going to go away now. So that was very quickly. That was an octopus that was That was uh, that was uh, that was an octopus that was uh on a rock And uh, it was camouflaged and it was using a variety of colorization mechanisms to do that one of which was based on structural color The other is based on some dyes that it uses But it's able to actually change its color in response to a stimuli Wouldn't it be great if we could change color in the lab? So everything that I showed me to this point There's always one color or could we change it and we've designed fields. We've applied electric fields in ways that I'll try this is now in the lab This is a student taking an image with a cell phone camera and you can see how the color is changing As we turn a field on and off So it's going to go from milky white To a more brilliant blue and we can go back and forth and these are real-time images And we're basically tabbing those colloids go from being crystals being ordered to being disordered We can also actually change the color In real time going from greens to blue And just to wrap up here and take your questions This is a little bit whimsical. We've actually learned how to do this with lasers And we can actually now We can now organize color on the scale of a human hair So the width of the object that you'll see that we're going to produce here is about 100 microns in width It's about 100 colloids across And you'll see what we're able to do. We're able to produce order on very small Scales as we turn on the field We can make a block M And when we turn the field off Through diffusion that block M is going to go away. I'll show that once more just in case it went by a little bit fast So we're going to turn on our field. So again that M block M is about the width of a human hair And we can organize colloids onto that scale Through the app through the right through this right mechanism and when we turn off If you don't like that color scheme this the student that did this younger Kim She uh Did some photoshop work and we can make that into amazing blue M This uh as as the as the field goes on This video is on youtube. That's our it's our our group's most uh Downloaded or watched video. It has about 100 000 hits And uh, it shows basically and this is all done With the same kind of physics that we learn from why butterflies are blue So with that i'm going to conclude by with a just a shout out to my students These are all rackham students. They're doctoral students of a left-hand image is a spring picture that we took a number of years back of the group at the time Youngery Kim is in the pink Shirt on the left hand side of your image She's the one that did the block M at the end and there are a number of other graduate students that participated in the work in that picture And the right hand image is our current group. Of course, we have to meet by zoom And this was on may 4th. So we were having a may the fourth be with you moment And uh, you can see that that's all of us. They're doing the best that we can under zoom So with that, um, I'd like to conclude and I'd be happy to take I'll stop sharing the screen So I can see you all And I would be happy to take any questions you would have Thanks very much for the opportunity to to talk about some work that is very dear to my heart and hopefully was was uh, some light And some light science for you this evening. Thanks very much Thanks, Mike. So, um, we're a group of enough size that if you want to raise your hand or unmute you can ask Mike a question Or you can also type in the chat and I'll be watching that As well While people are thinking of their questions. I'm going to ask Mike. How do you work with you? You mentioned that you're working with doctors is that Um, I'm curious to know how you work with other schools or like michigan medicine in your lab Yes, so um, great great question. There's a lot of really good links with our um, with michigan medicine hospital and the medical school I'll tell you the story. So that collaboration is with um, uh, two emergency medicine doctors Uh, the collaboration began actually about 10 years ago When I had a piece of equipment in my lab that A an md a doctor had heard about And I tried to try to actually wanted to just use it to get some measurements on a material that he was working with So while I was showing him how to use the instrument and why we were there I was like, well, what is it? And he said well some bacteria and then I was looking at the data I was like, wow that looks just like what we see for colloids And so we got to talking about it And that was actually really both of our interests like there's a lot of opportunity for faculty to collaborate together It's a very interdisciplinary place at michigan Just that chat actually we just continued the conversation we wrote like a a Like a seed grant from the medical school and then eventually we got an NIH funding to pursue that work and uh, there's been Probably about five phd students that have that have kind of gone on to different industry careers and academic careers based on that line of reasoning that really just got going based on a based on a conversation that um You know seems very serendipitous, but actually happens all the time at a place like university of michigan Where people are on the lookout for new connections and and new directions for their research Thanks, michel. That's a great question. I'm happy to answer further So I have a question Yes Professor Solomon, it's nice to meet you. So my name is giong park. I'm a graduate of iraqa my 2006 in physics And one of fascinating talk is really interesting My question regards the color blue Because we're michigan, but so you did talk about how blue actually is It's really difficult to find in nature. For instance pigmentation and bioluminescence blue is where It was interesting because in physics, I mean blue laser has been the toughest You know part of wavelength that has been able to kind of you know produce for many decades So is there a reason that blue seems to be the difficult thing to find in nature? Yeah, no, this is interesting to me as well So I think you know my what I've said is just kind of an observation that I read in the literature that blues and greens somehow life One reason why I think and this is really it gets a little bit out of my field, but The the molecules that tend to be pigments Um are these crotinoid molecules and they tend to absorb In these wavelengths that are that are in the blues. So then then you end up seeing like the yellows and the reds It's the reason why like leaves so that you mean the the big green pigment that's out there is chlorophyll Right and that's kind of the primary You know, you don't really think of it as a pigment so much But it but it really is and all these pigments actually typically have functions besides coloration Like they're meant to do something in plants usually related to energy harvesting So, you know, there are a few dyes. So if you look at say like Like some flowers pansies like the the uh, there's there's one pigment that is kind of in this purple range, but The by and large actually the pigmentation tends to be more on the on the red to yellow the orange side and I think it has You know, this this is really out of my area, but it just seems that The function of biological of these pigments isn't always about Isn't always about coloration. It's about harvesting the sun and that might drive where the colors are showing up That's my best answer, but it's a great question and it's one I've wondered about I think you're just one follow-up. So then blue is naturally hard to find but you know, butterflies and other animals showed us actually do Are able to produce, you know, blue structurally Do you think there's like an evolutionary pressure advantage for having those colors if you know, blue is hard to find in entry? Yeah, I so it seems to me yes, and um And but I I probably need to stop there. So I think this is you can see like, um, you know, I've I've been I'm not an expert kind of in biological colors and coloration This is kind of very very true often for engineers like we are inspired by what we view in the nature of natural world But we need to collaborate with an actual evolutionary I need to be collaborating with an evolutionary biologist Or a structural biologist or a molecular biologist to really to give you kind of good scientific answers to those questions you can kind of see the limits of Um of or maybe even how I work as a as somebody that does engineering science is that I read those literature I'm inspired by them and I ask questions about how that actually happens and then try to do it in the lab But often and this is my collaborator in emergency medicine just to connect to the previous connection You know, we would talk about like why do bacteria do these things and we would try to kind of develop evolutionary biology mechanisms But my collaborator who is a microbiologist would always say, you know, gotta be really careful about making I developing ideas about what bacteria Are doing in in people's bodies because bacteria have been around for billions of years and the reasons they do things Typically are much are not related all to people because they've been around for so much longer than people have been so So but these are these are great questions And you know the answer to them often do inspire us to do new research So I as I can learn these things. I try to try to try to do that. It's a great question. Thank you. Thank you Yes, yes, please go ahead Dr. I cannot I mean, thank you for your lecture, but I cannot ask a question about the topic so I'd like to ask you about the education at the university of michigan After this pandemic is under control Many people predict that the education and learning teaching and learning will not be the same Before the coronavirus and after and how how do you project? How is the teaching and learning at the university? Especially probably underground undergraduate programs. Uh, will they use a lot of online? Uh materials I mean online system and the the pedagogies and all that is how do you see The pandemic this pandemic is transforming the learning and teaching at the university Yeah, yes. I think it absolutely will we've learned so much. Um in the last year So just a couple comments that won't be very well connected because I think it's a You know, we don't really know the answer one of my colleagues has Has has read about disruptive change and I think this pandemic And how higher education how University of Michigan has responded has been a disruptive change People often kind of overestimate how much a disruptive change The effect of it over a short time period over like a year or so and they underestimate the impact 10 years later and so I think Lots of people are saying there's going to be a lot of change in the next year. I'm not so sure about that I think we just need to kind of like get going right and and not forget all the wonderful things that we've learned how to do And actually how fast we can change so things that you know, just in the space of like we could we never thought we could You know, even have a call like this like just this was really not even on our radar screen a year ago Now this is easy for all of us, right? So these things I think will be Increasingly incorporated. I think there's student patterns like students We think do learn better In person but they really like the ability to take classes from wherever they are And so I think there's some things to be worked out there In terms of balancing convenience and access which is you know, very important for learning like You know, let's offer an education to people wherever they are whatever their circumstances But how do you learn best and what are the components of that are in person that we really need to establish that? So I do think that there's going to be profound changes. I think that they will come later I think and so what we're trying to do right now at rack on across the university Is not lose our know-how to keep the space open so that we don't close off any of these really exciting future avenues But I do think it will take some time to do them. So one one and one example of that is that You know, probably the probably the right answer is like some kind of hybrid Right where you use the in person where it's needed and you use the the remote where it's needed But faculty this year have found that to be exhausting like to to hybrid instruction Has been like the faculty were fine instructors have really one request for next year Which is I can do remote I can do in person But please don't make me do both at the same time and that makes a lot of sense to me It's it can be really challenging to to manage what would you what you see here, right? And then the other 15 people that are over there, right? And so that that is that has been a challenge and so But I think those problems will be solved over time and I'm very optimistic that we have learned a ton from this period And some of it is like about the technology and the practice, but another is our own capabilities for change And you know, I just go back to this point that Higher education changes very slowly. I think there's a there's been a sense that you know Things work and they've worked a long time and we don't want to change and Rackham's own strategic vision in this space really is trying to catalyze change and graduate education and I think some of the things that faculty thought were In some amount of rehearsals actually are not quite the hurdles that we thought they were And so that would be the that would be the positive Going forward message that I'm trying to capture from the from the pandemic at the moment So I just wanted to Remark that we have a couple more minutes. So maybe if there's one quick question, Mike can take that before we wrap up Sure. Happy to Dr. Ahn Yeah Hi Let me introduce myself My name is Duncan. I'm a professor at the Solar National University I'm currently working as a dean of international affairs of Solar National University I'm really glad to To hear your period excellent lecture and also the University of Michigan's effort to recruit and support international students as you know For international cooperation area. We we have a lot of problems now Um, I just wanted to Let you know that we are very strong alumni network in Korea For Michigan. So if you have anything, uh, you need To mobilize us then just let us know We we are ready to support Your international academic activities Dan may be hugely hampered because of these corona situations um, so That that's that's all all my misses. That's thank you Thank you. No, I've had the pleasure to get to know, um, the Korean alumni club over many years I first met dr. Young. I think it was uh, well, it was when we had the um The alumni meeting in Seoul. So that must be probably three or four years now and I've been really Uh, delightful to to get to know you all and and understand You know the ways in which you You know are connected to michigan but also support your students As as they go. And so I I mentioned those 250 students and we have a group that come every year and You know, there are challenges at the moment. And so these connections are really helpful and powerful. So thank you Dr. Young Mike, uh, let me say a few words about professor han who just spoke. Have you met him before? I'm not sure we've had the pleasure of meeting. So it's nice to meet you virtually He is currently Dean of the international Affairs, I think at the Seoul National University, but he studied economics and also law school So he's one of the leaders in the, you know, international trade Issues so I think it's good for Two of you to know each other because you are positions at the moment. Okay. Thank you very much Thank you for the introduction. Yes Well, I guess back to you all so I just I'll just close with just again a big Thank you for the opportunity to engage with you. You know, it's a difficult moment I'm really wonderful that we you know, this is great discussion and participation and I'm really michelle and I And uh, Chris, we're all really delighted to be able to connect with you virtually at this moment. Thank you Thank you again for your excellent presentation And uh, we'll see you hopefully Sooner than later Yes, yes very much hope so very much. Okay Thank you, and we'll send an email out with the recording and the slides to everybody You'll get at the end of next week Okay, thank you Go blue go blue. Bye. Bye