Abstract:
One research goal of Guan group is attempting to merge supramolecular chemistry and material chemistry for the design of advanced materials. Natural materials employ many elegant strategies to achieve mechanical properties required for survival under harsh and rapidly changing environmental conditions. Thus these remarkable biopolymers often not only have a combination of mechanical properties such as high modulus, toughness, and elasticity, but also exhibit adaptive properties. Inspired by the modular multidomain structure of the skeletal muscle protein titin and other biological polymers, we have designed and synthesized a series of biomimetic modular polymers with supramolecularly folded, energy-absorbing nano-domains as the principle repeat units. These new material manifest an exciting combination of key mechanical, as well as adaptive, properties that have until now proven difficult to achieve in man-made macromolecular systems. Single molecule force measurements have revealed sequential unfolding mechanism that contributes to the exceptional mechanical stability. In this presentation, I will discuss the design, computation, synthesis, and single molecule studies of our biomimetic polymers.

Biography: Zhibin Guan is a professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. He obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees at Peking University, and Ph.D. degree in 1994 at UNC-Chapel Hill. Following a postdoctoral stint at Caltech, he spent five years at DuPont Central Research Laboratory as a Senior Scientist before joining UCI as an Assistant Professor in 2000. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004 and Full Professor in 2006. He has received a number of awards, including the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Humboldt Bessel Award. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science. His research interests span the broadly defined fields of organic, biological, and macromolecular materials chemistry.