Date/Time
Date(s) - 30/01/2025
1:30 pm - 2:20 pm

Title: Supramolecular Synthesis Inspired by Nature

Date: Thursday January 30, 2025

Time: 1:30-2:20pm

Room: ABB 165

Host: Dr. Katherine Bujold

Abstract:

The functional hallmarks of life —such as growth, motion, and repair—are enabled by dynamic, transient structures scaffolded by noncovalent interactions. These noncovalent interactions act cooperatively to dictate how biological building blocks assemble both in space and in time. Recapitulating natural functions in synthetic materials thus demands a similar level of structural control. However, such control has thus far proven elusive due to the lack of a robust toolkit for building materials through deliberate, noncovalent synthesis. Our group seeks to address this gap by developing new noncovalent reactions and motifs to fully harness the potential of supramolecular chemistry as a synthetic discipline. In this presentation, I’ll share our recent progress towards meeting this challenge in two contexts: (1) inhibiting protein aggregation using amphiphilic supramolecular chaperones and (2) exploring the assembly of Janus nucleobases. Together, these initial studies highlight how foundational supramolecular chemistry can be leveraged to mimic and manipulate biological systems.

Biography: 

Ben Partridge is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Rochester, where he leads a supramolecular chemistry group working to design new materials to mimic and manipulate biological systems. He completed undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford in his native UK before moving to the University of Pennsylvania as a Thouron Fellow for doctoral work on supramolecular chirality with Virgil Percec. While at Penn, he was awarded an HHMI International Student Research Fellowship. In 2019, Ben joined the group of Chad Mirkin at Northwestern University as an International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) Postdoctoral Fellow, using DNA to program protein assembly. In 2021, Ben was recognized with the IIN Outstanding Researcher Award. In July 2022, Ben launched his independent career at the University of Rochester, where he is affiliated with both the Chemistry-Biology Interface (CBI) Training Program and the Materials Science Program. In his free time, Ben enjoys cooking, walking and cycling in the greater Rochester area, and, as a self-proclaimed avgeek, plane-spotting.