Publications by authors named "D C Ray"

Objective: Upper limb movement difficulties in children with acquired brain injury (ABI) result in longer recovery times compared with lower limb. Intensive neurorehabilitation promotes a good long-term functional outcome. Virtual reality (VR) and video game technologies are invaluable adjuncts to traditional neurological rehabilitation as they help to motivate, engage and gain children's compliance in goal-directed therapy.

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Self-assembly of amino acids and short-peptide derivatives attracted significant curiosity worldwide due to their unique self-assembly process and wide variety of applications. Amino acid is considered one of the important synthons in supramolecular chemistry. Self-assembly processes and applications of unfunctionalized native amino acids have been less reported in the literature.

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Chemical selectivity is traditionally understood in the context of rigid molecular scaffolds with precisely defined local coordination and chemical environments that ultimately facilitate a given transformation of interest. By contrast, nature leverages dynamic structures and strong coupling to enable specific interactions with target species in otherwise complex media. Taking inspiration from nature, we demonstrate unconventional selectivity in the solvent extraction of light over heavy lanthanides using a conformationally flexible ligand called octadecyl acyclopa (ODA).

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We introduce an enhanced sampling algorithm to obtain converged free energy landscapes of molecular rare events, even when the collective variable (CV) used for biasing is not optimal. Our approach samples a time-dependent target distribution by combining the on-the-fly probability enhanced sampling and its exploratory variant, OPES Explore. This promotes more transitions between the relevant metastable states and accelerates the convergence speed of the free energy estimate.

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This research explores the development of engineered oil-water microemulsions stabilized by a synergistic combination of polymer and surfactant to enhance stability and interfacial properties for improved enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Conventional surfactant-stabilized emulsions often suffer from phase instability and limited wettability alteration during water flooding and chemical injection, hindering the EOR efficiency. In contrast, our formulations incorporating polymers significantly increase the emulsion viscosity and resilience to temperature fluctuations, resulting in enhanced phase stability.

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