Marcus D. Lay, Assistant Professor Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, & Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center

Professor Lay received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2003. He was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. from 2003 to 2004 and a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University from 2004 to 2005, before joining the faculty at the University of Georgia in 2005.

Notables

National Research Council (NRC) Postdoctoral Fellow 2005

University of Georgia Research Foundation Grant 2007

Faculty Science Coordinator, LSAMP

Funding

National Science Foundation,

Division of Materials Research,

Division of Human Resource Development

Recent News

The Lay research group was recently featured in Columns and the Red and Black.

Jihye Shim recently earned her Ph.D.!!! She is moving on to a Research Faculty position at Kyung Hee University in Korea

Undergraduate researcher Megan Cauble recently won the Student Employee of the Year Award

Terry, Pornnipa and Meagan recently published a paper on the application of percolation theory to carbon nanotubes networks synthesized with laminar flow deposition

Pornnipa and Jihye recently published a paper on a new mild method for purifying single-walled carbon nanotube soot

Pornnipa and Terry’s work was featured on the cover of the international analytical chemistry journal The Analyst

Terry gave a talk on his research in the chemistry department at Tsinghua University, China

Lay Group Research

Nanotechnology, which involves the manipulation and observation of matter on an atomic- and molecular-scale, is expected to yield many revolutionary discoveries in areas as diverse as energy conversion/storage, electronics and medicine over the next few years. The Lay research group is largely concerned with obtaining structure/function relationships for how the nano- and micro-scale morphology of electronic materials affects macroscopic behavior.  Graduate and undergraduate researchers in this group obtain expertise in a wide variety of analytical techniques used in nanotechnology and analytical chemistry. This includes the following equipment in the Lay research Lab: atomic force microscopy, confocal Raman microscopy, semiconductor device characterization (with a probe station and semiconductor characterization unit), UV-Vis spectroscopy, near-IR spectroscopy, mid-IR spectroscopy, electrochemistry, high-vacuum metal deposition, spin-casting thin-films, nano-particle separation, fluorescence microscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy and nanoparticle dispersion. Additional equipment is available through the UGA Cleanroom.

At the forefront of the research conducting in this group are the following two high-importance/high-impact areas of nanotechnology research: 1) developing routes to formation of 2-D networks of SWNTs with strict control over large-scale electrical properties by developing deposition methods that allow control over density and orientation of large numbers of individual SWNTs, 2) development of non-oxidizing methods for creating suspensions of high-aspect-ratio SWNTs.

Recently published articles from the Lay Research Group

Thinking about Graduate School?

The University of Georgia has world-class expertise and facilities in all of the traditional chemistry disciplines. Further, we conduct cutting edge interdisciplinary research through the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. For information about applying to the graduate program at UGA, click here.