UPRM-CCNY COLLABORATION

IDEALS Doctoral students Jonathan Victoria Camacho and Wilmer Martinez Valle are part of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez (UPRM) and The City College of New York (CCNY), under the joint mentorship of Profs. Ubaldo Cordova of UPRM and Ilona Kretzschmar of CCNY.

This year Wilmer focused on complementing theoretical findings with experimental validation by fabricating active-magnetic Janus particles using iron oxide as the magnetic component and platinum as the catalytic material. The fabrication involved suspending magnetic (iron-oxide) particles in solution and drying them under an applied magnetic field, which produced a distinctive stagger-like alignment. A platinum layer was then deposited onto the exposed surface, creating particles with a novel asymmetric configuration.

Jonathan's research goal is to understand how the combination of magnetic interactions, dipole displacement, and self-propulsion can be used to program reconfigurable colloidal structures and active materials. He uses Brownian dynamics simulations to study the self-assembly of active magnetic Janus colloids with radially shifted dipoles in quasi-2D and 3D. A major milestone this year has been the preparation of a manuscript that summarizes these results. While Wilmer spent time during the summer working at CCNY, Jonathan remained at UPRM. However, they worked closely together on the data analysis, figure preparation, and iterative manuscript writing.