Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Brenda Rubenstein, Brown University

Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Brenda Rubenstein, Brown University (Host: Tom Markland)

About the Seminar

"Storage and Computation Using Small Molecules and Their Reaction Networks"

As transistors near the size of molecules, computer engineers are increasingly finding themselves asking a once idle question: how can we compute using chemistry? In this talk, I will discuss recent progress my Brown Molecular Informatics team and I have made demonstrating how mixtures of small, unordered molecules can process information. During the first portion of this talk, I will illustrate how combinatorial chemical synthesis combined with high resolution mass spectrometry can be harnessed to store GBs of information in small molecules and metabolites. I will then turn to describing how basic principles of chemistry can be exploited to realize fully molecular neural networks for machine learning and image processing. I will end with a discussion of the challenges molecular computation faces that may be resolved with clever doses of synthetic and theoretical chemistry, and the connections molecular computation has to the field of systems chemistry.

About the Speaker

Dr. Brenda Rubenstein is currently the Joukowsky Family Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Brown University. While the focus of her work is on developing new electronic structure methods, she is also deeply engaged in rethinking computing architectures. Prior to arriving at Brown, she was a Lawrence Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She received her Sc.B.s in Chemical Physics and Applied Mathematics at Brown University, her M.Phil. in Computational Chemistry while a Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at Columbia University. Ask her about basketball - you may be suprised!

Photo courtesy of Amy Simmons, Brown University.