MCGSS SUMMER SERIES – Dr. Helen Tran – University of Toronto

Date/Time
Date(s) - 18/07/2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Zoom link available from gsamcgss@mcmaster.ca or chemgrad@mcmaster.ca

Dr. Tran is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the
Department of Chemistry (cross-appointed in the Department of Chemical
Engineering). She was an Intelligence Community postdoctoral fellow at
Stanford University under the mentorship of Prof. Zhenan Bao in the Chemical
Engineering Department, where she worked on stretchable and
biodegradable electronics. She received her BS in Chemistry with a minor in
Chemical Engineering from the University of California—Berkeley in 2009,
conducting undergraduate research with Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu (Electrical
Engineering, Berkeley) and Prof. Christopher Schuh (Material Science,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In the two subsequent years, Dr. Tran
was a post-baccalaureate fellow and Scientific Engineering Assistant in Dr.
Ronald Zuckermann’s research group at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley
National Labs, exploring the self-assembly of biomimetic polymers into 2D
nanosheets. She completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2016 under the
supervision of Prof. Luis Campos, broadly investigating hierarchical ordering
and periodic patterning in block copolymer systems.

Tuning the molecular design of polymers to achieve self-assembled
degradable, semiconducting, and stretchable composites

Next-generation electronics will autonomously respond to local stimuli and
be seamlessly integrated with the human body, opening the doors for
opportunities in environmental monitoring, advanced consumer products,
and health diagnostics for personalized therapy. For example,
biodegradable electronics promise to accelerate the integration of
electronics with health care by obviating the need for costly device-recovery
surgeries that increase infection risk. Moreover, the environmentally critical
problem of discarded electronic waste would be relieved. The
underpinnings of such next-generation electronics is the development of
new materials with a wide suite of functional properties beyond our current
toolkit. Organic polymers are a natural bridge between electronics and soft
matter, where the vast chemical design space allows tunability of electronic,
mechanical, and transient properties. Our research group leverages the
rich palette of polymer chemistry to design new materials encoded with
information for self-assembly, degradability, and electronic transport. In this
talk, I will share our progress on the molecular design of degradable
semiconducting polymers featuring acid-labile motifs.