Dr. John Walz, MSOE president, will speak at the inaugural Dennis C. Prieve Endowed Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday, Oct. 8. The Dennis C. Prieve Lecture Series was created to honor the memory of Dennis Prieve, Gulf Professor of Chemical Engineering Emeritus. Prieve spent his entire career at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Chemical Engineering and was a leading researcher in the field of colloid and interfacial science.

Walz earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992 and Prieve served as Walz’ advisor. After Prieve passed, Walz and another former student led an effort to raise funds to create an endowed lecture in his honor.

“To my honor and great surprise, I was invited to give the inaugural lecture,” said Walz.

Walz’s lecture, “Enough is Enough and Too Much is Just Right - The Many Things I Learned from Dennis Prieve,” will touch on Prieve’s contributions to colloidal science, lessons learned from Prieve, current challenges facing higher education, and more. Learn more in the lecture summary below.

Enough is Enough and Too Much is Just Right - The Many Things I Learned from Dennis Prieve
Throughout his career, Dennis Prieve made significant contributions to a variety of topics in colloidal science, including diffusiophoresis, electrokinetics, colloidal stability, and interparticle forces. Perhaps his most significant contribution, however, was the development of the technique of Total Internal Reflection Microscopy (TIRM), which has the ability to detect interaction energies resulting from femtonewton-level forces acting on a single colloidal particle with nanometer-level spatial resolution. In this talk I will review the fundamentals behind TIRM and show some examples of its application to measuring both interaction energies and near-contact particle dynamic properties. I will also highlight some of the lessons I learned as a graduate student working with Dennis that have helped me throughout my career. Finally, I will close by talking a bit about the current challenges facing higher education institutions, specifically small private institutions, and how my own institution has responded to those challenges.