Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The next stop on our journey was the group of Georges Belfort at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), which is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking part of the world. After a good sleep and a rather modest breakfast at the motel we drove to the campus in Troy. The walk to the meeting hall took us up the hills across the beautiful RPI campus. We marveled at the historic buildings and the many squirrels.

After a very warm welcome from Prof. Belfort and the head of the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering department, we spent the morning in a symposium listening to and discussing presentations of Phd students from RPI and WUR. We learned about the confinement of enzymes in nanopores changes their properties and how flexible polymers elongate in shear flow, amongst many other topics.

We had lunch in the student union, and after that the program continued with a talk about the history of the institute, which was founded by Stephen van Rensselaer, who was of dutch origin. Prof. Belfort then took us on a tour to visit the labs of the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering institute. The display of experimental techniques was quite impressive, among them an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer. Fortunately nobody had a pacemaker. Other devices included a setup for small angle X-ray scattering for structure determination and a confocal scanning laser microscope. The tour ended with a visit to the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).

After the tour ended, Prof. Belfort took us to a student bar on campus where we finished the day with a drink. We then went back to the cars for our journey to Ithaca, which would take us 3 hours. The last part of the trip we drove on a dark road through the countryside which invoked memories of American horror movies to some of us. But everybody managed to get to the hotel in Ithaca without getting attacked by werewolves.