Oh, hey there Nerds, fancy meeting you here! We really had a great time last month when we met up at LIVE. Do you think you might want to do it again? How about Thursday, March 14 back at LIVE (102. S. First St)? Oh good, it’s a date! See you there!
Doors open at 6:30 pm, talks start at 7 pm and as always, there’s no cover charge!
We’ll kick things off with Mike Gould and go Through Time and Space with Illuminatus Lasers! Mike will explore the last decade of laser shows in Ann Arbor at FoolMOON. Get an up-close look at these interactive laser displays be they against the wall of science or various buildings downtown. You *might* even have the chance to play with a laser or two in the breaks throughout the evening’s Nerd Nite!
A victim of his own artistic tendencies, Mike is a Michigan-based laser, graphics, video, and electronics artist. Mike has been gleefully working with lasers, wacky electro-optic gizmos, assorted digital arts, and odd industrial design since 1972. He is still trying to get it right. You can find him at https://illuminatuslasers.com/
Keeping it on the light side (get it? GET IT?), we have Saaj Chattopadhyay with How I ask molecules what their political leanings are (with the help of gold echo chambers). Do molecules have political tendencies? Okay, no, they don’t, but just like people’s politics, molecules “handedness” leans to either the right or the left. When they interact with twisted light near gold nanoparticles, their “leaning” is amplified and scientists like Saaj are studying individual molecules to understand their leaning to make bio-sensors!
Saaj is a graduate student at the University of Michigan who is fascinated by how much we can understand about the world by looking at how light interacts with it. She spends a lot of time in a dark room hoping that the small gold particles she is looking at will do something cool and interesting.
We hope you’ve still got small things on the brain because it’s time for Nerd Nite on Nanobodies: Llamas + Science + Tech! Oh My! What are these tiny little proteins called nanobodies and what do llamas have to do with it? Mary Skinner from the Taubman Nanobody Initiative at the University of Michigan will be discussing this promising new field of research and the potential it brings for new tools in therapeutics and research.
Mary is the Research Lead at the Taubman Nanobody Initiative and has been working in the molecular biology field for 15 years, managing laboratories at the University of Michigan since 2012. She was the first ever winner of the Best Lab Manager Award throughout North America and Europe in 2016.