Kalow's Phase I NSF CCI Awarded Funding
July 30, 2018
Professor Julia Kalow is an investigator on a Phase I NSF CCI that was just awarded funding.
Synthetic polymers and plastics make up a $100 billion industry and impact almost every aspect of daily life: from transportation to consumer products to health care. These materials are made up of long, individual polymer molecules that are connected in a network that forms the bulk material. In recent years, chemists have learned how to produce remarkable properties in the individual polymer molecules and control the connections between them. The Center for the Chemistry of Molecularly Optimized Networks (MONET) is developing the knowledge and methods to translate the remarkable properties now available at the molecular level to new properties of polymer networks.
In Phase I, Kalow will collaborate with Craig (PI, Duke), Johnson (MIT), Olsen (MIT), and Rubenstein (Duke) to develop strand chemistry to store length through non-covalent interactions and characterize out-of-equilibrium behavior in dynamic networks.