The Physics department colloquia are usually on Friday afternoons at 3:30 pm in Lapham Hall Room 160. Coffee and cookies are served at 3:15 pm in the same room. Anyone is welcome.

Bone Tissue Composition and Heterogeneity At the Micro- and Nano-scale
Dr. Adele L. Boskey, PhD Starr Chair in Mineralized Tissue Research – Hospital for Special Surgery and Professor of Physiology, Biophysics & Systems Biology and Professor Biochemistry – Weill Cornell Medical and Graduate College of Cornell Univ.; Professor, Mechanical Engineering – Cornell Ithaca & City College of New York (CUNY)

Bone is a composite tissue with a heterogeneous structure. Heterogeneity is thought to be important for bone to perform its functions (mechanical and homeostatic) yet analysis of such heterogeneity has been limited due to the absence of appropriate evaluation techniques. We developed FTIR imaging (FTIRI) for the characterization of bone quality and have applied it to studying bone heterogeneity changes in development, health and disease in pre-clinical models as well as humans. FTIRI provides a chemical photograph of the composition (in terms of IR active vibrating molecules) of thin sections of tissues at a ~7 um resolution. We are now also applying AFM-IR (with 100 nm resolution) to determine whether heterogeneity also exists at the nanometer level.