Science at the Shine Dome 2010

Early-career researcher awards

Thursday, 6 May 2010

2010 Frederick White Prize

Dr Amanda Barnard
CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering

Amanda Barnard is an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow and is leader of the Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory at CSIRO. She received her PhD in applied physics from RMIT University in 2003, before going on to a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory, and the prestigious senior research position of Violette and Samuel Glasstone Fellow at the University of Oxford, with an Extraordinary Research Fellowship at Queen's College. For her work in theoretical and computational nanoscience she won a 2008 L’Oreal Australia ‘For Women in Science’ prize, the 2009 Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the 2009 Mercedes Benz Australian Environmental Research Award and the 2009 Malcolm McIntosh Award from the Prime Minister of Australia for the Physical Scientist of the Year.

Modelling the environmental stability and environmental impacts of engineered nanoparticles

For the move from nanoscience to nanotechnology to be sustainable, it is important that the possible risks associated with nanomaterials be addressed before commercialisation. This includes both toxicology and environmental impact studies, which often show that many hazardous characteristics can ultimately be traced back to the reactivity of individual nanoparticles. Unfortunately, reactivity may vary depending upon size, shape, degree of agglomeration, and the chemical and thermal environment – and the task of testing all possible permutations, for all the different nanoparticles in production, is fast becoming unfeasibly large. However, much of the important information required to identify which nanoparticle/environment combinations require more immediate attention is contained within nanophase diagrams and related structure-property maps.

In my talk a new method for generating environmentally-sensitive phase maps for nanoparticles will be briefly presented, based on a size- and shape-dependent thermodynamic model and material parameters obtained from density functional theory calculations. Results for titanium dioxide nanoparticles will also be discussed, to demonstrate how the solid-solid transformations occurring in this system depend on the size, temperature and chemical environment, and the effect this has upon the reactivity and potential for ecotoxicity.