One of the greatest challenges in heterogeneous catalysis is the rational design and development of new catalytic systems, due to synthetic limitations in the design of solid catalysts and inhomogeneity of chemical sites at solid surfaces. This obfuscates understanding of catalyst behavior and slows improvements of processes. One approach to...
Efficient and sustainable utilization of global resources represents a grand but achievablechallenge. By leveraging biology, we can transform abundant, but recalcitrant resources like lignin
to products ranging from fuel to medicine to polymers. Efforts to do so are expansive, but
challenges remain, due in no small part to the difficulty...
Conventionally cross-linked polymers, which comprise the vast majority of commercial thermosets, cannot be decross-linked after curing or flow upon heating. Therefore, they cannot be effectively recycled into high-value products at end-of-life. Their lack of recyclability is due to the permanent cross-links, which restrict the flow of the chains in the...
Shale gas is a critical energy resource that is comprised primarily of light gases that are expensive to transport. Because these gases are geographically spread-out and there is insufficient capacity to transport them to centralized processing facilities, they must often be flared, leading to great sources of resource waste and...
Protein-based biomaterials are widely used in biomedical applications and mechanical support because of their novel structural flexibility, biocompatibility and mechanical properties. Protein-based biomaterials outperform traditional synthetic materials in various environments as traditional materials lack the diverse chemical functionalities that proteins offer. Novel bioinspired techniques such as directed evolution offer the...
Protein-protein interactions are ubiquitous in living systems, and mediate important cellular processes from decision making to immunity against pathogens. Furthermore, protein-protein interactions are key to many protein therapeutics, pathogen diagnostics, and numerous synthetic biology applications. As a result, there has been significant effort to develop methods to express potential protein...
Conventional polymer networks are composed of strong, fixed covalent cross-links. The covalent cross-links render polymer networks with outstanding mechanical properties, heat stability, and chemical resistance; however, they also prevent polymer networks from being decross-linked or/and recycled into similar-value products at the end of their life, leading to environmental and economic...
Oil paintings are complex works of art, even on the molecular level. Drying oils cure into a solid film through autoxidation and polymerization reactions and then degrade, leading to changes in material properties and film stability. This chemistry can be captured in a computational model and used by researchers in...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies marry advances in cellular engineering with personalized medicine to provide patient-specific, targeted cancer treatments. Though current CAR T-cell therapies successfully target blood cell cancers, treating solid tumors has proven to be more challenging. Solid-tumor CAR designs must overcome several challenges, including tumor microenvironment barriers...
Mixing by cutting-and-shuffling (like that for a deck of cards or a Rubik's cube) is a paradigm that has not been studied in detail even though it can be applied in a variety of situations including the mixing of granular materials. Mathematically, cutting- and-shuffling is described by piecewise isometries (PWIs),...