Engineering Sequence-Defined Polyelectrolytes for Advanced Applications.
Charged polymers known as polyelectrolytes have been studied for decades, however understanding their physical properties remains a persistent challenge for polymer scientists. This difficulty stems from the intricate interplay between length scales spanning as much as 3-4 orders of magnitude, which has stymied our understanding of a truly important class of polymers; polyelectrolytes are widely used in applications ranging from food additives to paints, and most biopolymers (proteins, DNA, polysaccharides) are also polyelectrolytes.
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Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Sarah L. Perry is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received BS degrees in Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, as well as an MS degree from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sarah was also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Her research interests are highly interdisciplinary, and utilize self-assembly, molecular engineering, and microfluidic technologies to understand the fundamental principles behind materials design to inform solutions to real-world challenges. She has been recognized with a number of different teaching awards, along with the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and was a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2020.
Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Charles E. Sing is a Helen Corley Petit Scholar and Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his BS and MS in polymer science from Case Western Reserve University in 2008, and his PhD in materials science from MIT in 2012. Prior to starting at Illinois in 2014, Charles was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. His research interests are broadly in the area of computational and theoretical polymer physics; current projects focus on molecular and sequence properties of polyelectrolyte solutions, out-of-equilibrium rheology of semidilute polymers, polymers with nonlinear architectures, and charge transport in redox active polymers. He was recognized as one of Forbes' '30 Under 30 in Science' in 2015, was the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2017, and as an ACS PMSE Young Investigator in 2020.
