Cain Department of Chemical Engineering SEMINAR

“Engineering Precise Materials Through Discrete Polymeric Building Blocks”

Jimmy Lawrence
UC, Santa Barbara

Polymeric building blocks with precise structures and functions are key to address a host of grand challenges in energy, environment, and healthcare. While traditional synthetic polymers are highly modular and possess a significant degree of structural tunability, challenges related to their inherent dispersity have limited their use as key materials in targeted applications. In this seminar, I will describe our initial efforts to address this challenge through the development of a versatile and scalable strategy to access discrete/monodisperse synthetic oligomers. Through a combination of controlled polymerization and separation techniques, libraries of discrete oligomers from a wide range of monomer families could be isolated at multigram scales with excellent structural control. The second part of this seminar focuses on the use of discrete oligomers to elucidate the impact of dispersity on block copolymers and conjugated materials. Tailoring the dispersity enables the preparation of new materials with unprecedentedly precise properties and answers long-standing fundamental questions of functional polymers at monodisperse limits.

Thursday, January 11, 2018
10:30am

1202 Patrick Taylor Hall

Coffee will be served at 10:30am