The Department of Materials Science and Engineering welcomes you to its 2015 Spring Colloquium Series.

Speaker: Ting Xu, University of California, BerkeleyLocation: Tech L361, 4:00pm

"Toward Using Protein/Peptide as Material Building Block"The scientific community has been striving for decades to generate biomimetic materials to access many of the beneficial properties seen in Nature. However, there has been limited success in obtaining structural control, catalytic activity, molecular transport, and modulated responsiveness to small perturbation. Proteins, nature's "own" building blocks, have many unique features unmatched by any synthetic organic or inorganic analogs. Rather than developing biomimetic protein-like building blocks, using natural proteins to construct functional materials will clearly change the paradigm of materials science. I will present our explorations to design, synthesize and characterize protein/peptide-based functional materials. Specifically, I will discuss how our fundamental studies in peptide/protein-polymer conjugates led to functional materials in several areas, including 3-helix micelles as long circulating stable nanocarriers, and protein stabilization in non-biological environment.

Biography: Dr. Ting Xu received her Ph.D from the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2004. She did her postdoctoral training jointly between the University of Pennsylvania and the Cold Neutron for Biology and Technology (CNBT) team at National Institute of Science and Technology from 2004-2006. She jointed University of California, Berkeley in both the Department of Material Sciences and Engineering and Department of Chemistry in January 2007. Researches in Xu's group take advantage of the recent developments in de novo protein design and peptidomimetics, polymer science and nanoparticles synthesis and manipulation; and use natural building blocks such as peptides and proteins in concert with the self-assembly of block copolymers, conjugated molecule and nanoparticles as platforms to generate nanostructured functional materials. Her research group focuses on a fundamental understanding of multiple length self-assemblies in multi-component systems and aims to generate hierarchically structured nanomaterials with built-in biological, electrical and magnetic functionalities. Prof. Xu has over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, 5 book chapters and several patents. She is the recipient of 2007 DuPont Science and Technology Grant; 2008 3M Nontenured Faculty Award; 2008 DuPont Young Professor Award; 2009 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award; 2010 Li Ka Shing Woman Research Award; 2011 Camille-Dreyfus Scholar-Teacher Award; and 2011 ACS Arthur K. Doolittle Award. She was named as one of "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science Magazine in 2009.