Bio
My name is Ben Treml I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin and am an avid fan of their football team, the Green Bay Packers. I also enjoy keeping up with the UW-Madison (my alma mater) football team, the Badgers, and baseball games played by the Milwaukee Brewers. When I play sports I prefer to play soccer. Besides sports, I love exploring all of the great parks around Ithaca with my wife and my dog. The thing from home that I have missed most since coming to Ithaca is deep fried cheese curds. That may sound weird, but it isn’t, they are delicious. Thankfully, a restaurant near my house has started serving “Wisconsin Style” deep fried cheese curds. My wife and I like to take credit for this because we had a conversation with one of the chef’s at the restaurant this fall while watching a Packer game and mentioned cheese curds to him.
My undergrad degree is in Engineering Physics from UW-Madison, where I studied and researched nanotechnology and its potential for energy applications. During my undergraduate career, I was able to have a wide range of research experiences, from spending a summer working in a clean room doing research on biosensors, to over a year working at the Forest Products Laboratory, the biggest lab of the US Forest Service, working to use the waste from biofuel production to make cheap, strong, composite materials. The desire to perform fundamental research in the field of nanotechnology has led me to pursue a Ph.D in Materials Science here at Cornell. After obtaining my degree, I would like to move from the laboratory to industry where I can work to use the results of my research, or similar technological advances to bring the promise of nanotechnology into the real world.
Teaching seems to run in my blood – my grandmother, mother, aunt, and wife have had careers in education. Even though I’m an engineer I find that I really enjoy really enjoy working with kids trying to inspire them to follow my path towards a career in a STEM field. I am excited to participate in the GK12 program because I believe it will give me a great opportunity to share my experiences.
Research
Nanoparticles are interesting. When you make a material really really small, so small that you can measure its diameter in tens or hundreds of atoms wide the material may show wildly different properties than the large chunk of material you could hold in your hand. There has been a lot of work done in the last 10-20 years towards the development of many different types of nanoparticles, and towards understanding how and why the materials behave differently at the nanoscale.
My research looks to build on that by going up in size rather than down. My goal is to take these nanoparticles, which can have nearly any property you want, and build up larger super structures from them. A good analogy is table salt. Table salt is an ordered array f Sodium (Na) and Chlorine (Cl) atoms. By themselves, Na will explode when it contacts water and Cl is the main component in bleach. However, when you put them together you get a tasty compound that you need to eat in moderation to stay healthy. Similarly, my goal is to take nanoparticles, mix and match them guided by our understanding of their individual properties, and produce new materials with new properties.
Because of the wide range of nanoparticles available, the applications of this general method are nearly endless. However, the Hanrath Group in Chemical Engineering is focused on energy applications, and so I am working to make materials that can either collect energy from the sun (solar cells) or from waste heat (thermoelectrics).
A self assembled structure made from gold and iron-oxide (rust) which has potential applications in catalysis.