Date: November 25th, 2025 | Time: 1:00 PM | Location: Macdonald Engineering Building- MD 267| Hosted by TISED & Brace Water Centre
Achieving a nanocircular economy requires advances in multiple areas of nanomaterial research including determination of nanomaterial release from products and composite materials. The success of a nanocircular economy will require broader participation in these areas of research, necessitating affordable, quantitative analytical tools that can be accessed by a greater proportion of the scientific community, which our group has addressed through the development of several electroanalytical methods. First, we optimized a highly reproducible linear sweep stripping voltammetry (LSSV) method to quantify silver nanoparticle (AgNP) dissolution kinetics in real-time. Separately, we have developed a technique that utilizes a single nanoparticle electrochemistry technique, particle-impact voltammetry (PIV), to monitor AgNP aggregation. More recently, we developed a novel electrochemistry technique that allows for the simultaneous speciation and quantitation of silver ions and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) released from AgNP-containing textiles. The technique we’ve developed is affordable (less than 20,000 USD) and has rapid analysis times (~7 min) that allow for release mechanisms to be elucidated. This talk will explore the development and application of each electroanalytical technique, as well as opportunities for future development.
Dr. Kathryn Riley
Dr. Kathryn Riley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Swarthmore College. She received her Ph.D. from Wake Forest University in 2014 and was a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2015-2016. She was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) postdoctoral fellow at Swarthmore from 2016-2018 and began her tenure-track career in 2018. Dr. Riley’s research involves the development of analytical techniques for the characterization of nanomaterials (NMs) and their dynamic physical and chemical transformations in biological and environmental matrices. Her research group specifically aims to broaden participation in the field by developing techniques that provide new quantitative insights in less time and at a reduced cost when compared to more commonly employed methods. Projects in her group span the analysis of engineered NMs (metal and metal oxide NMs, DNA nanostructures) and incidental NMs (nano and microplastics).