CAREER: Shape-Adaptive Molecules: Understanding, Controlling, and Exploiting Molecular Motions

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This CAREER award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program supports work by Professor Dongwhan Lee at Indiana University to investigate a new class of shape-adaptive molecules as a general structural platform that can amplify and transmit conformational changes over a long distance. Using individually weak, but collectively strong, non-covalent interactions between symmetrically disposed bulky aromatics, this research offers an innovative solution to balance structural rigidity (to limit the number of competing conformations) and flexibility (to enable large-scale structural switching). The longer-term objective of this project is implementing viable mechanisms to transduce such mechanical signals to readable electrical signal outputs in molecular-level devices. By eliminating the requirement of direct electronic coupling between recognition events and signaling events, this research challenges and complements existing paradigms in molecular sensing. Construction and manipulation of such organized and interactive chemical systems require problem-solving skills crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries between inorganic, organic, analytical, and computational chemistry. The educational program supported by this award, Chemistry Beyond Molecules (CBM), will use materials chemistry as a versatile pedagogic tool for teaching undergraduate students. Through integration of lectures, laboratories, and summer projects that are designed to reinforce each other, CBM will "reintroduce" basic chemical concepts and encourage students to use organizing principles, not simple facts, to solve problems in interdisciplinary areas in chemistry. Active learning in multiple context, a key aspect of CBM, will help produce well-rounded problem solvers who can perform well in rapidly changing research environments that demand adaptive and transferrable skills.