Speaker
Description
Living organisms can grow a huge variety of materials with the highest degree of sophistication, and an overall efficiency that remains largely unparalleled by artificial fabrication techniques. Moreover, living materials are adaptive i.e. they exist and perform autonomously under dissipative conditions. These features are made possible by the ability to control complex reactions networks, carefully organized in spatiotemporal sequences.
Developing autonomous chemical systems that could imitate the properties of living matter is a challenge at the meeting point of materials science and systems chemistry. Chemical clocks thus become versatile tools to program in time the autonomous and transient self-assembly of organic as well as inorganic building blocks.
The design of such ad hoc reaction networks is at the core of my current research efforts. I will show how to “clock” molecules, polymers and metal cations into different structures, from nanoparticles to gels, without the need for external control, and demonstrate how this approach paves the way to the development of (almost) living artificial materials.
| Speaker Country | Switzerland |
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