Joseph Tracy
Faculty
Assistant Professor
Email: jbtracy@unity.ncsu.edu
Phone: 919-513-2623
Location: 3074D EB I
Tracy's interests include Chemistry, physics, and toxicology of colloidal magnetic and metallic nanoparticles, and their applications in composite materials, devices, spintronics, biology and medicine.
Many kinds of nanoscale materials have unusual physical properties due to their reduced dimensions and high surface-area-to-volume ratio. We prepare colloidal magnetic and metallic nanoparticles using a "bottom-up" approach starting from chemical precursors. The organic monolayers are manipulated for assembling nanoparticles and integrating them with other kinds of materials, such as polymers. Magnetic nanoparticles are single-domain nanomagnets and lose their magnetization due to thermal energy (superparamagnetism), which is beneficial for some applications and detrimental for others. Metallic nanoparticles have a well-developed ligand monolayer chemistry, and their surface plasmon resonance absorbance is sensitive to interparticle coupling. Nanoparticle core sizes and size distributions are measured using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and the magnetic properties are obtained from magnetometry (SQUID) measurements.
Education
- Ph.D. Physical Chemistry MIT, 2005
- B.S. Chemistry University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000
Links
- Magnetic and Metallic Nanoparticle Research Group http://www.mse.ncsu.edu/nanomagnetism/
- NSF Triangle MRSEC: Programmable Assembly of Soft Matter http://mrsec.duke.edu
- Tracy's Recent Publications http://www.mse.ncsu.edu/research/publications/Tracy, J
- Google Scholar Profile http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=dRdgw0EAAAAJ