Education
BS, Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2021
Research Interests
Nanomaterials, self-assembly, polymer chemistry, biomimetic materials, DLS
Research Summary
My research goal is to create synthetic protein mimetics from polymer-DNA composite materials. These bioactive polymers will adopt the structural support role of proteins in the extracellular matrix. Bioactive polymers are highly programmable and their synthesis is automatable, which makes them good biomimetic materials. I’m currently conjugating single-chain polymeric nanoparticles to one another with short DNA ligands, and eventually hope to design polymer complexes that mimic the structure of ECM protein complexes. These polymer-DNA conjugate materials are synthesized using a Hamilton liquid handling robot, polymerized with PET-RAFT polymerization, and characterized using a combination of DLS and UV Vis. I use these techniques to determine hydrodynamic size and DNA incorporation. This far, we have been able to conjugate DBCO-containing polymers to single stranded DNA composed of 10 thymine bases functionalized with a 3’ azide. The next step will attempt conjugate complementary DNA strands to one another to form 3D polymer assemblies. Once we can reliably create polymer assemblies, we will start to manipulate the shape of these materials to more accurately mimic extracellular matrix proteins.