Talk abstract:
Polymers of complex architectures: synthesis and supramolecular construction
Polymers of novel architectures with functions and promising applications are one of the most interesting topics nowadays. Our recent achievements on dendronized polymers, polymer brushes, as well as stimuli-responsive block copolymers will be addressed, which covers (1) helical dendronized polymers based on 4-aminoprolines diastereomers and L-lysine; (2) thermoresponsive dendronized homopolymers and block copolymers; (3) giant molecular bottlebrushes based on dendronized polymers and conformation investigation on helical polypeptide brushes; (4) stimuli-responsive block copolypeptides.
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Prof. Afang Zhang works as an independent senior scientist since 2005 at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with the founding from Swiss National Science Foundation, ETH grants, as well as industry supports (BASF and Ciba). At same time he holds a position of "Henan distinguished professor of polymer chemistry and physics" at Zhengzhou University, China. He earned his Master degree at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei (1988), and PhD degree at Peking University (1999). He spent eight years in between at Chemistry Institute of Henan, China, where he was a group leader for industrially oriented R&D, hosted more than 30 research projects supported both by Chinese government and Henan province. There he became an assistant professor in 1989, associate professor in 1992 and full professor in 1998. Thereafter, he started his fundamental research carrier. After spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Deutsches Kunststoffinstitut (DKI), Darmstadt, Germany, in the group of Prof. M. Rehahn doing synthesis and morphology study on polyurethane foams, he then joined (from 2000 to 2002) as a senior scientist in Prof. A. D. Schlüer's group at Free University of Berlin, Germany, concentrating on synthesis and characterization of novel dendronized polymers. There he was also teaching a polymer course in a Polymer Science Master Program run by four universities in Berlin. Prof. Zhang's main research interests comprise dendronized polymers, polymer bottlebrushes, polypeptides, organocatalysis, and polymers with switchable properties. He presently has approximately 60 publications and three patents.