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Energy and Medicine: Professor Edward Van Keuren and Scientific Innovation

“It feels really good to contribute,” Van Keuren said. “I would do this anyway, but it’s nice to have it mean something more than just research for research’s sake.”

By Akoto Ofori-Atta

Edward Van Keuren
, Associate Professor of Physics at Georgetown University, has found himself in the middle of groundbreaking research in two vital industries: energy and medicine.  

“I guess I got to the right places at the right times,” Van Keuren said of his involvement with both of these important fields.

Van Keuren’s knack for perfect timing and his affinity for all things physics have served the Georgetown community well. Since coming to Georgetown in 1999, Van Keuren has published more than 20 articles in science journals, a body of work that is bursting with physics and optical research. His research with a solar energy company will examine materials for developing organic solar cells, and in collaboration with the Lombardi Cancer Center, Van Keuren is conducting research that will develop nanoparticles for cancer diagnosis.  

“I tend to work on about five or six different research projects at a time,” Van Keuren said. “But these two are the ones I’m working on the most these days.”

On the energy side, Van Keuren is working with Virginia-based Luna Nanoworks, a division of Luna Innovations Inc., on developing materials for solar technology, specifically through the use of organic solar cells. Using nanoscience, they will create material comprised of nanoparticles embedded in flexible polymers. Eventually, these types of materials could be painted directly onto an object, thus making it simple to harvest the sun’s energy from almost anywhere.

“Right now, this is really a project of gradual improvement,” Van Keuren explained. “We knew from the beginning that this material would be perfect for capturing the sun’s energy and it’s looking very promising.”

With regard to his medical research, Van Keuren’s project with The Lombardi Cancer Center is two-fold. The first part involves examining new nanoparticles to create contrast agents that will make small, hard-to-see tumors easier to find in a magnetic resonance image (MRI). As early diagnosis has been defined as crucial in successful cancer treatment, Van Keuren hopes that this groundbreaking research, being carried out in collaboration with members of the Georgetown chemistry department, will assist in that effort.    

“Small tumors are difficult to see in MRIs,” Van Keuren explains. “We are focused on creating contrast agents that will help to make an image brighter so you one can see it, and thus a small tumor, more clearly.”

While the first part of this project involves early cancer diagnosis, the second part examines the uses of nanoparticles for cancer treatment.

“We are trying to use nanoparticles in conjunction with some of the cancer center’s new technology to actually kill cancer cells,” Van Keuren said.

Van Keuren notes that, while his relationship with Georgetown has been instrumental in his involvement with these research projects, interestingly enough, he never had aspirations to work at the university level.

“I had spent summers interning at IBM and Kodak, so I really wanted to work in the industry,” Van Keuren said of his professional aspirations.

Van Keuren received a physics degree in 1984 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Two years later, he earned his master’s degree in physics from Carnegie Mellon University. He was mainly interested in optics, which is a branch of physics that studies light. Van Keuren’s optics studies focused on the use of lasers to either fabricate materials, or characterize materials in a way that can make them easier to understand. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Physics, Van Keuren followed his dreams to work in the corporate sector by accepting a visiting science position in Germany with the world’s top chemical company, BASF.

While stationed in Germany, he took advantage of the long-term optics research relationship that Germany had developed with the Japanese government and companies. He received a job offer with a Japanese national lab, later moving back to BASF Japan, where he developed materials for telecommunications through the use of optics and optical switches. As the project came to completion, BASF was ready for Van Keuren to return to Germany and expand his role to a more managerial function, something that Van Keuren did not see as a perfect fit.

“While I was working in Japan, I had gotten married and had children, so I either wanted to settle in Japan or return to the U.S.,” Van Keuren recalls. “So when Georgetown started a new graduate program that focused on industrial physics, it seemed like the right place to be.”
 
As he explains of his ultimate research goals, Van Keuren hopes that his research efforts will contribute to advancements in both medicine and energy. To ensure that he does all he can to work toward that goal, Van Keuren has joined colleagues from the Lombardi Cancer Center and other Georgetown science faculty in an organization called GC Fit—a center for cross-campus collaboration where they combine resources across the different sciences to see if they can address medical problems.

“It feels really good to contribute,” Van Keuren said. “I would do this anyway, but it’s nice to have it mean something more than just research for research’s sake.”

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