The Chemical and Biological Engineering Department is pleased to present a seminar by Chinedum Osuji from University of Pennsylvania as part of our ChBE Seminar Series.

Chinedum Osuji will present a lecture titled "Creating Useful Nanostructured Soft Materials (and single crystals) by Directed Self-Assembly."

ABSTRACT: Controlling structure and thereby manipulating the properties of matter is a central concern for material scientists and chemical engineers. A striking disparity exists in our ability to enact such structural control in self-assembled soft materials, relative to hard condensed matter systems. This talk examines strategies for directing self-assembly in nanostructured soft matter to create useful materials, including single crystals and materials with bespoke textures. Our focus is on self-assembly of block copolymers and small molecule mesogens. The ability to precisely control their chemical functionality combined with the readily tunable characteristic length scales (~1-100 nm) of their self-assembled mesophases position these systems as a versatile and attractive class of materials for compelling applications ranging from membranes for size and chemo-selective transport, to optics, and lithography. As a result, there is intense interest in elucidating the physical processes relevant for directing their self-assembly to create application relevant structures, with a goal of exploiting such fundamental understanding to create useful materials or devices. This presentation discusses such directed self-assembly of soft nanostructured materials and emerging methods for generating highly ordered and hetero-structured systems. In particular, we focus on recent advances in the creation of highly ordered nanostructured membranes for water purification and electrochemical devices, and small length scale structures for lithography in microelectronics.

Prof. Chinedum Osuji received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 2003, for studies of structure-property relationships and self-assembly of liquid crystalline block copolymers with Prof. Edwin L. Thomas. From 2003-2005 he was a Senior Scientist at Surface Logix Inc. where he worked on soft lithography, and from 2005-2007 was a Postdoctoral Associate in Applied Physics at Harvard University with Prof. David A. Weitz where he studied shear-induced structure and dynamics of colloidal gels. From 2007-2018 he was on the faculty at Yale University in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. In 2018 he joined the University of Pennsylvania where he is currently the Eduardo D. Glandt Presidential Professor, and Chair, in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and a secondary member of the faculty in Materials Science and Engineering. Prof. Osuji is an Associate Editor for Macromolecules and serves on Editorial Advisory Boards for Physical Review Materials, Journal of Materials Chemistry, and ACS Polymers Au. He leads an experimental research group focused on structure and dynamics of soft materials and complex fluids. Topics of interest include structure-property relationships in ordered soft materials, directed self-assembly of block copolymers and other soft mesophases or molecular materials, and rheology and slow dynamics of disordered systems.

Prof. Osuji is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (2008) and the 2010 Arthur Greer award of Yale College. He received an Office of Naval Research's Young Investigator award and a 3M Nontenured Faculty award in 2012. He is the recipient of the Dillon Medal of the American Physical Society (2015), the Hendrick C. Van Ness Award (2019), and the Nano Research Young Investigator Award (2019). He is also a recipient of the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award (2021) and a Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (2022) for his research on advanced membranes for water purification.

Bagels and coffee will be provided at 9:30am, and the seminar will start at 9:40am. Please plan to arrive on time to grab a bagel and mingle!

*Please note that there will be no Zoom option for seminars this year.