Telluride Science Town Talks: “Life in Color,” 6/10!

05 Jun Telluride Science Town Talks: “Life in Color,” 6/10!

This coming week the 2025 Telluride Science Town Talks series continues with “Life in Color: From Photochromic Crocs to the Future of Electronics,” featuring Dr. Natalia B. Shustova. The event takes place Tuesday, June 10, 6:30 pm, doors, 6 p.m., at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village. Town Talks are FREE and open to the public.

Visit telluridescience.org to learn more about Telluride Science and the capital campaign to transform the historic Telluride Depot into the Telluride Science & Innovation Center. The venue is the permanent home for Telluride Science and a global hub of inspired knowledge exchange and development where great minds get to solve great challenges.

The 2025 Telluride Science Town Talks series is presented by Alpine Bank with additional support from the Telluride Mountain Village Owner’s Association.

Go here for more about Telluride Science.

Go here for more on Town Talks.

ASAP: As Soon As Possible
OMG: Oh My God
IDK: I Don’t Know
G2G: Got to Go
TBD: To Be Determined
LOL: Laughing Out Loud

The above are all popular acronyms or shorthand expressions used in everyday communication, often in texting, online conversations, or informal settings.

But MOF?

Not pop at all. Likely not in your lexicon.

Well, MOF stands for Metal Organic Frameworks or molecules that consist of metal ions and organic links that can be modified for specific properties that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks. Not surprisingly, MOFs have many applications. And. if properly executed, those applications can and will transform building construction, clothing, smartphone materials, even the pharmaceutical industry.

Welcome to the world of Dr. Natalia Shustova, a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, a Hans Fischer Fellow, and a Peter and Bonnie McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina.

Dr. Shustova, courtesy Telluride Science.

At her upcoming Town Talk, Dr. Shustova plans to focus on different applications of MOFs and the ways in which they can be used to promote sustainability and improve our quality of daily life.

Take for one example eyeglasses with lenses that seamlessly darken in the sun thanks to photochromic material – but that seamless application does not stop there. The coating which triggers the darkening is starting to be used on airplanes. Many now have passenger windows that can be darkened on command to shade travelers, a great alternative to those ubiquitous plastic blinds.

In major cities with skyscrapers, high energy costs are in part the result of air-conditioning designed to keeps buildings cool over the summer months. Shustova has an answer to that too. She will describe how MOFs can be used on windows that will magically, seamlessly darken in the sun to protect a buildings from hot rays, thus cutting down on energy consumption. These same window coatings can even be used as transparent solar panels, generating electricity for the skyscrapers as they cool them.

A developer? Please HMU (Hit Me Up).

And there’s more…

Thanks to the work of Shustova & Co. we will eventually be able to purchase a jacket that uses solar energy to charge your phone whenever you wear it.

In short, Metal Organic Frameworks or MOFs stand poised to transform the ways in which solar energy is captured, harnessed and applied.

Also thanks to Shustova’s R & D (Research & Development, duh!) in addition to the many aforementioned solar energy applications unlocked by these photochromic materials, MOFs also can be used to create drugs that activate on demand, only affecting certain areas of the body. That phenom allows these drugs to be delivered directly and only to the place they are actually needed rather than, per usual, being distributed throughout the bloodstream. A big Bingo.

Bottom line: whether it be solar energy-producing buildings, mitigating the challenge of charging cell phones over the course of a day, or on-demand, targeted delivery drugs, the research being conducted on Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) by Shustova could give us the tools that help change the ways we interact with the world around us in very positive ways.

So if you don’t attend this Town Talk, you run the risk of suffering from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)!

Go!