ENSE Seminar Series – Dr. Halil Okur

Sunday, 26 November 2017
4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Auditorium between Bldg. 4 & 5, Level 0

Halil I. Okur received his B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in Chemistry from Bilkent University (Turkey), followed by a Ph.D. degree from the Pennsylvania State University, working with Professor Paul S. Cremer. In his PhD studies, he deciphered multiple mechanisms of ion-macromolecule interactions with molecular level details. He received the Apple Fellowship for his work entitled “Cations bind only weakly to amides in aqueous solutions”. He is currently doing postdoctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), working with Professor Sylvie Roke. His research focuses on developing and performing experiments with biologically relevant interfaces to elucidate macroscopic properties with molecular level details.

Title: Shining Non-linear Light to Selectively Probe Surfaces

Non-linear scattering enables to probe previously inaccessible “hidden” surfaces. More specifically, the recently developed state-of-the-art sum frequency and second harmonic scattering techniques facilitate to attain surface selective information of the chemical composition, molecular orientation and hydration properties of the molecules at surfaces. By employing these powerful techniques, we recently investigated a few interfacial phenomena. These include but not limited to the orientational order of water molecules at the surface of biomembranes, imaging surface chemistry of buried silica in aqueous solution, and probing the phospholipid monolayers of adiposome organelles. The emphasis of the talk will be on non-linear optical techniques with some recent applications.

References:
1) C. Macias-Romero, I. Nahalka, H.I. Okur, S. Roke “Optical imaging of surface chemistry and dynamics in confinement” Science (2017), 357,6353, 784-788
2) H.I. Okur, Y. Chen, D.M. Wilkins, S. Roke “The Jones-Rya effect reinterpretted: Surface tension minima of low ionic strength electrolyte solution are caused by electric field induced water-water correlations” Chemical Physics Letters (2017) 684, 433-442.
3) H.I. Okur, Y. Chen, N. Smolentsev, E. Zdrali and S. Roke “Interfacial Structure and Hydration of 3D Lipid Monolayers in Aqueous Solution” The Journal of Physical Chemistry B (2017), 121, 13, 2808-2813.