Professor Patra and his team has been working on an approved project at Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Lab. The project entitles; Graphene Nanoribbon-DNA Self Assembly. Project will be lead by Professor Patra. The team members include Ashish Aphale, Isaac Macwan, Professor Saion Sinha (from University of New Haven), Professor Hassan Bajwa and Professor Christian Bach. The principal contact from the BNL is Dr. William Sherman

Researchers Brent Carey, Prabir K. Patra, Lijie CI, Glaura G. Silva and Pulickel Ajayan have recently published their startling findings on previously unseen self stiffening phenomena in synthetic materials in the prestigious peer reviewed journal ACS Nano. Details of the research can be found in the website: http://pubs.acsoi/abs/10.1021/nn103104g

Brent Carey, the first author of the paper and a graduate student at Rice University drew an analogy between their material and bones. "As long as you're regularly stressing a bone in the body, it will remain strong," he said. "For example, the bones in the racket arm of a tennis player are denser. Essentially, this is an adaptive effect our body uses to withstand the loads applied to it. "Our material is similar in the sense that a static load on our composite doesn't cause a change. You have to dynamically stress it in order to improve it." Cartilage may be a better comparison -- and possibly even a future candidate for nanocomposite replacement. "We can envision this response being attractive for developing artificial cartilage that can respond to the forces being applied to it but remains pliable in areas that are not being stressed," Carey said.

Professor Patra, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, University of Bridgeport and one of the team members in this research feels ''This is a fascinating research in the sense that if we can precisely control the nanocomposite interface (in this case the interface between the polymer and carbon nanotube) we can come up with exciting materials that will adapt themselves under sustained dynamic loading by self strengthening" . "This will not only lead to interesting artificial biological structures such as connective tissues, muscles, bones etc but its implications can be significantly beyond" says Patra. " Active and Adaptive Biomaterials will hold tremendous future and this work has the potential to pave the way" says Patra

"People have been trying to address the question of how polymer layer around a nanoparticle behaves" says Professor Ajayan, Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of Chemistry, Rice University in whose lab experiments were carried out. "It's a very complicated problem. But fundamentally, it's important if you're an engineer of nanocomposites" Ajayan says.

"From the perspective, I think this is a beautiful result. It tells us that it's feasible to engineer interfaces that make the material do unconventional things" says Ajayan.

Other co-authors of the paper are former Rice postdoctoral researcher Lijie Ci; and Glaura Goulart Silva, associate professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Dr. Prabir Patra has been awarded the P-30 pilot grant from Core Center for Quantitative Neuroscience with Magnetic Resonance (QNMR) of Yale University. The pilot study proposal for NMR detection of graphene nanoribbons has been granted for at least 16 slots on the vertical bore 11.7T system and the grant will cover all costs associated with these NMR scans, reagents used for sample preparation, and effort on the part of scientists, technicians, and/or engineers. In this pilot grant Professor Patra will collaborate with and report his progress to Professor Fahmeed Hyder from Yale University.

Development of Fiber-based Technology for Creating New Opportunities in Economically Depressed Northeastern US, grant amount $600,000, solicitation is PFI (partnership for innovation), Suku Sengupta (PI), Prabir Patra (CO-PI), Arup Sengupta (CO-PI from Lehigh University) and Steve Warner (Awarded February, 2008 with total amount of US$ 600,000)