Emerging Insights into Directed Assembly: Taking Examples from Nature to Design Synthetic Processes
The Yale Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering and The Goizueta Foundation Present The Barnett F. Dodge Distinguished Lecture in Chemical Engineering
Juan J. de Pablo
Institute for Molecular Engineering
University of Chicago
Argonne National Laboratory
"Emerging Insights into Directed Assembly: Taking Examples from Nature to Design Synthetic Processes"
There is considerable interest in controlling the assembly of polymeric systems in order to create highly ordered materials for applications. Polymers are easily trapped in metastable, non-equilibrium states, and the processes through which they assemble become an important aspect of any materials design strategy. An example is provided by di-block copolymer directed self-assembly, where a decade of work has shown that, through careful choice of process variables, it is possible to create ordered structures whose degree of perfection meets the constraints of commercial semiconductor manufacturing. As impactful as that work has been, it has focused on relatively simple materials - neutral polymers, consisting of two or at most three blocks. Furthermore, the samples that have been produced have been limited to relatively thin films, and their assembly has been perfected on ideal, two-dimensional substrates. The question that arises now is whether one can translate those achievements to polymeric materials having a richer sequence, to monomers that include charges, to three-dimensional substrates, or to active systems that are in a permanent non-equilibrium state. This presentation will review recent work from our group and others that explains how directed assembly of polymeric materials and liquid crystals can be used to create functional thin films for applications in separations, nanofabrication, sensors and photonic materials. Building on discoveries from the biophysics literature, I will then discuss how nature has evolved to direct the assembly of nucleic acids into intricate, fully three-dimensional macroscopic functional materials that are not only active, but also responsive to external cues. We will discuss how principles from polymer physics serve to explain those assemblies, and how one might design a new generation of synthetic systems that incorporate bio-inspired designs by relying on concepts from evolutionary optimization and machine learning.
Bio: Juan de Pablo earned his BChE from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 1992, where he was the Howard Curler Distinguished Professor and the Hilldale Professor of Chemical Engineering before joining the Institute for Molecular Engineering in 2012. From 2000 to 2012 he also served as Director of the Materials Research and Engineering Center on Nanostructured Interfaces.
Juan de Pablo has co-authored over 500 publications and twenty patents. He received the DuPont Medal for Excellence in Nutrition and Health Sciences in 2016, the Intel Patterning Sciences Award in 2015, and the Charles Stine Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2011. He served as chair of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation from 2013 to 2017, and the Committee on Condensed Matter and Materials Research at the National Research Council from 2015 to 2017. He is the founding editor of Molecular Systems Design and Engineering, and co-director of the new Center for Hierarchical Materials Design.
Juan de Pablo was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for "design of macromolecular products and processes via scientific computation." He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Physical Society. de Pablo was elected as Foreign Correspondent Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2014.
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
10:30AM MC 035
Becton Seminar Room
10 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Breakfast Reception 9:45AM
MC 035
This series of lectures is named in honor of B.F. Dodge. He was born on November 29, 1895 in Akron, Ohio, and obtained his BS in ChE from MIT in 1917. Before joining the Yale Department of Chemical Engineering, Mr. Dodge worked as a chemical engineer with DuPont, first in the area of chemical explosives. In 1919, he was transferred to the main office as Assistant to the Manager of the Inspection/Standards Division, Chemical Department. From 1920 to 1922 Mr. Dodge was with Lewis Recovery Corporation, Boston, Mass.
In 1921 he became a Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at Harvard University, and from 1922-1925, the period of his Harvard PhD dissertation research on the thermodynamics of liquefied air, he also lectured at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He came to Yale in 1925 as Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1930 and, in 1935, to Professor. In 1931 he became Chairman of the Yale ChE Department, a post he held for thirty years.
In addition to his leadership roles at Yale, Professor Dodge served on many committees and was elected President of AIChE in 1955. He held 7 U.S. Patents, and published approximately 85 papers in technical journals, numerous book reviews, as well as one now classic book, Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, in 1944 (McGraw Hill.)
The Barnett F. Dodge Lectures are made possible by The Goizueta Foundation through a gift to Yale University, School of Engineering & Applied Science, Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering.