Dr. Valeria Milam

Biography

Valeria Tohver Milam joined the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in July 2004. She received her B.S. in Materials Science Engineering with Honors from the University of Florida in 1993 and later completed her M.S. degree in 1997 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she interned at Sandia National Laboratories. Milam's doctoral work at UIUC focused on the phase behavior and structural properties of nanoparticle-microsphere suspensions. Her experimental results suggested a novel colloidal stabilization mechanism, known as nanoparticle 'haloing', where negligibly charged microspheres become effectively charge-stabilized by a surrounding shell of highly charged nanoparticles. She finished her Ph.D. in 2001 and subsequently conducted postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which concentrated on DNA-mediated colloidal assembly. Her research indicates that the specific attraction of DNA-grafted microspheres varies with sequence length, concentration, and ionic strength, resulting in a variety of colloidal structures such as chains and rings based on suspension composition.

Research Interests