Sun Sun


Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station A5300
Austin, TX 78712-0165





















Contact Information


Office: WEL: 3.210AA
Phone: 475-8674

Lab


Office:
Phone:
Fax: 475-8651

Richard M Crooks


crooks@cm.utexas.edu
Biochemistry/Analytical Professor, Faculty


Research Group


Crooks Group

Education


BS, University of Illinois, 1981
PhD, University of Texas, 1987

Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT (1987-1989)

Awards


ACS Award in Electrochemistry, 2008
Carl Wagner Memorial Award of the Electrochemical Society, 2003

Affiliations


Center for Electrochemistry; Center for Nano- and Molecular Science and Technology; Texas Materials Institute;

Bioanalytical chemistry, nanochemistry, and electrochemistry


The group's research interests include electrochemistry, nanomaterials, catalysis, chemical and biological sensing, and microanalytical systems. For example, we are interested in learning how the physical and chemical properties of catalysts affect their selectivity and efficiency. Nanoscale catalysts in the 1-3 nm size range are of particular interest, because very slight changes to materials in this size range materials can dramatically affect their catalytic properties. Accordingly, we recently developed a new template-based approach for preparing multimetallic catalysts that have a high degree of compositional and structural uniformity. These materials provide the means for quantitatively understanding the relationship between catalyst structure and function. One important lesson we have learned during the course of our studies is that there are not many good analytical methods for studying the properties of nanoparticles smaller than about 3 nm, and therefore we are also inventing new analytical methods to better understand these materials. The group also has a long-standing interest in chemical and biological sensors. The objective of these studies is to design, build, and understand electrochemical sensors that each consist of thousands of electrodes and that have limits of detection and sensitivities approaching those of fluorescence-based sensors. Such miniaturized devices have applications as point-of-care testing systems for genetic and infectious disease states. Finally, we recently discovered a method for replicating the types of DNA microarrays that are currently the workhorse of genomic testing. At present such arrays are usually made by spotting one test site at a time, but they can be expensive because each array can consist of >1,000,000 test sites. Our approach results in replication of an entire array in parallel, which could result is a substantial reduction in cost. The chemistry underlying the replication principle is fascinating in its own right and is also under study.

Representative Publications



V. Petkov; N. Bedford; M. R. Knecht; M. G. Weir; R. M. Crooks; W. Tang; G. Henkelman; A. Frenkel "Periodicity and Atomic Ordering in Nanosized Particles of Crystals" J. Phys. Chem. C 112 (2008): 8907-8911.

R. Dhopeshwarkar; R. M. Crooks; D. Hlushkou; U. Tallarek "Transient Effects on Microchannel Electrokinetic Filtering with an Ion-Permselective Membrane" Anal. Chem. 80 (2008): 1039-1048.

M. R. Knecht; M. G. Weir; A. I. Frenkel; R. M. Crooks "Structural Rearrangement of Bimetallic Alloy PdAu Nanoparticles within Dendrimer Templates to Yield Core/Shell Configurations" Chem. Mater. 20 (2008): 1019-1028.

K.-F. Chow; F. Mavre, R. M. Crooks "Wireless Electrochemical DNA Microarray Sensor" J. Am. Chem. Soc. 130 (2008): 7544-7545.

J. Kim; R. M. Crooks "Parallel Fabrication of RNA Microarrays by Mechanical Transfer from a DNA Master" Anal. Chem. 79 (2007): 8994-8999.