Designing Polymers to Adhere to Surfaces

In this talk, I will take a deep dive into the importance of polymer-surface interactions and how designing these interactions enables control and application in products. My work has ranged from placing DNA origami on silicon for envisioned use as a molecular breadboard to creating “electric glue”, where adhesion of a single polymer to a substrate was controlled via applied electric potential to the surface, to pressure sensitive adhesives, where the polymer-surface interactions are a critical component for designing these functional adhesives. From my time as a postdoctoral fellow (at IBM and LMU Munich as a Humboldt Fellow) to my current role as a scientist at 3M, where I work to understand the behavior of polymeric materials for implementation in new products, an understanding of fundamental polymer science and manipulation of interfacial interactions has served as a unifying foundation that has propelled my research.