On September 13-17, 2010, Barry Bruce, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology, joins a group of 15 scientists selected from around the country to converge on Asilomar, California, for an “Ideas Lab” entitled, “Surpassing Evolution: Transformative Approaches to Enhancing the Efficiency of Photosynthesis,” sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Bruce is a leading expert in sustainable energy research; his work focuses on adapting the biological machinery in plants to produce electricity and biofuels.
Bruce is also a co-principal investigator and one of three scientific thrust leaders of a NSF $20 million grant, announced on September 9. It is the largest NSF grant ever awarded in Tennessee. The project, “Tennessee Solar Conversion and Storage Using Outreach, Research and Education” or TN: SCORE, will help create a collaborative culture among the state’s universities and community colleges, to promote the state’s science and engineering capabilities, enhance research competitiveness, and stimulate economic development. Other UT scientists instrumental in winning the award include Stacey Patterson, director of UT Research Partnerships, and principal investigators David Millhorn, Tom Zawodzinski, and Greg Sedrick.
Bruce is a co-founder and associate director of the Sustainable Energy and Education Research Center (SEERC) and a co-principal investigator in the Sustainable Technology through Advanced Interdisciplinary Research (STAIR) program, one of the two NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) programs at UT Knoxville. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Microbiology and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. In 2007, Forbes magazine selected him as one of the “Ten People that May Change the World.”
Selected Publications
Mukherjee, D., May, M., Vaughn M., Bruce, B. D., & Khomami, B. (in press). Controlling the Morphology of Photosystem I Assembly on Thiol-activated Au Substrates. Langmuir.
Iwuchukwu, I., Vaughn, M., Myers, N., O’Neill, H., Frymier, P.D & Bruce, B.D. (2010). Self-organized Photosynthetic Nanoparticle for Cell-free Hydrogen Production. Nature Nanotechnology 5: 73-79.
Mulder, C.L., Theogarajan, L., Currie, M., Mapel, J.K., Vaughn M., Willard, P., Moss, M.W., C.E.
McLain, C.E, Morseman, J.P., Bruce, B.D., Baldo, M.A. (2009). Luminescent Solar Concentrators Employing Phycobilisomes. Advanced Materials 21(31): 3181–3185.
Reddick, L.E., Chotewutmontri, P., Crenshaw, W., Dave, A., Vaughn, M., and Bruce, B.D. (2008). Nano-scale Characterization of the Dynamics of the Chloroplast Toc Translocon. Methods in Cell Biology 90:365-98.
Matsumoto, K., Koutsopoulos, S., Vaughn, M., Bruce, B.D., and Zhang, S. (2008). Designer Peptide Surfactants Stabilize Functional Photosystem-I Membrane Complex in Aqueous Solution for Extended Time. J. Phys. Chem. B 113: 75-83.
Gaysinsky, S., Taylor T.M., Davidson, P.M., Bruce, B.D., and Weiss, J. (2008). Antimicrobial Efficacy of Eugenol Microemulsions in Milk against Listeria monocytogenes and Escherichia coli O157:H7 J. Food Prot. 71:6: 1256-1261.
Visit the Quest Gallery at Trace, UT’s digital archive, to access publications of other Quest Scholars of the Week.