Auburn University School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences Fall Seminar Series Presents:

Dr. Mehdi Tajvidi, Assistant Professor of Renewable Nanomaterials and Graduate Program Coordinator, of the School of Forest Resources, University of Maine, will give a talk titled, What is outside the box (or the bottle!) for cellulose nanomaterials?

Seminar is held at 11 a.m. in the SFWS Conference Room 1101 located on the first floor of the SFWS Building at 602 Duncan Drive, Auburn, AL.

• Faculty, students and the public are invited to attend this free program.
• Complimentary cookies and coffee will be served.
• CFEs are available by request.
• Advanced registration is not required.
• Parking is available on the 3rd and 4th floors of the South Quad parking deck on Duncan Drive, directly across from the SFWS Building. See Parking Services on Level 3 to obtain a visitor pass.

Abstract: Cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) are perhaps the only type of cellulose nanomaterials that have the potential for both large volume production and large volume applications in near future. Much research has been conducted on the production, property assessment and applications of these interesting materials in many laboratories and the promise for an outstanding, multi-functional renewable material has been widely advertised. While a considerable amount of effort has been made to modify CNF to make it work with systems that it inherently does not interact with much, an alternative approach towards taking advantage of the natural strengths of CNF for applications it is comfortable with seems to be finding traction in the scientific community. Concurrently, research towards using CNF as the bulk material and not as an additive is finding more and more attention for biomedical applications. This presentation offers a description of new and emerging applications of CNF that are scalable and promise large volume production. The ultimate objective is to provide potential areas of predicted “success” in the use of CNF.

Biography: Mehdi Tajvidi joined the School of Forest Resources in 2013. After completing his Ph.D. program in Natural Resources Engineering at the University of Tehran in 2003, Mehdi worked as an Assistant and later an Associate Professor at the Department of Wood and Paper Science and Technology, the University of Tehran for 8 years. In 2007 Mehdi received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) award to do research at the Department of Biomaterials Sciences, the University of Tokyo, Japan where he worked as a Visiting Professor for two years. Upon moving to Canada in 2011, Mehdi worked as a Visiting Professor and a Research Associate at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada before Joining the School of Forest Resources in September 2013 as the Assistant Professor of Renewable Nanomaterials. Mehdi’s areas of research interest are production, characterization and performance evaluation of renewable nanomaterials and their composites. He is particularly interested in mechanical properties of nano-materials and nanocomposites, structure-property relationships, viscoelastic behavior, dynamic mechanical analysis and magnetic cellulose nanocomposites. To date, Mehdi has published over 100 papers in academic journals, presented over 50 presentations at international conferences and advised/co-advised over 45 graduate students.