Highly Ordered Polymeric Materials via a Monomer Self-Assembly Approach

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9625433 Gin This CAREER grant details the research and educational plans of the Principal Investigator: A research program dedicated to the synthesis of new polymeric materials is described, as well as several new approaches to graduate and undergraduate education. Aside from chemical structure, one of the most important factors in realizing the intrinsic properties of materials is extended order on the small scale. Order on the molecular level such as crystallinity permits cooperative interactions between molecules in the material for improved properties on the macroscopic level. However, in materials science, varying degrees of order are obtained in synthetic polymers and composites typically via post- synthesis processing (i.e., stretch-aligning). As materials chemists, one of the issues that we would like to address is whether we can control or induce bulk order in materials through the structural design of the constituent molecules, instead of through post-synthesis processing. Specifically, we are interested in exploring the use of self-organizing monomers based on liquid crystals as highly organized media for the construction of a variety of sophisticated polymeric materials. We applying this approach to two areas of materials research: (1) The synthesis of new piezoelectric polymers in which order and bulk symmetry can be controlled on the molecular scale. (2) The synthesis of highly organized polymeric composites in which nanometer-scale geometry can be predetermined through liquid-crystalline matrix monomers. %%% Several ideas for the improvement of chemical education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels are also proposed. Among these ideas is a modular approach to undergraduate chemical education, where students will be able to pick the topics they are interested in learning about, in any order they desire. This would be modeled after special- topics lectures in the Modular Chem Consortium (MC2), and NSF sponsored modular teac hing program aimed toward developing and evaluating a modular approach to teaching chemistry in the first two years of the undergraduate curriculum. ***