Rowland Pettit Centennial Visiting Professorship - Todd Emrick

The Organic Seminar Series presents: Todd Emrick
Rowland Pettit Centennial Visiting Professorship
UMass Amherst
Host: Zak Page
Title: Functional Polymer Chemistry at Interfaces: from Nano- to Mesoscale Structures
Location: WEL 2.122
Refreshments served at 3:15pm
 

This lecture will apply concepts and methods of organic and polymer chemistry to targets in materials science, with the objective of producing fundamentally new and useful structures in areas such as optoelectronics, dynamic surfaces, and surfactant/interface science. Specific topics to be presented will merge synthetic advances with functional interfaces, such as the synthesis of novel polymer zwitterions that have generated a surprising breadth of new findings, ranging from 1) nanocomposite electronic materials involving perovskite nanocrystals and stabilizing polymer ligands that boost the thermal and solvent stability of this class of nanocrystals; and 2) unexpected interfacial properties in fluids and at polymer-air and polymer-droplet interfaces, including petal-like effects in which hydrophobic surfaces hold water due to their unusually large contact angle hysteresis; and 3) new concepts in surfactant science, and specifically mesoscale structures that wrap fluid interfaces to produce droplets with extending filaments or package droplets in their entirety.