Nano-Biomolecular Hybrid Materials

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Integration of novel engineered nanomaterials with biological molecules opens the door to tremendous opportunities for the generation of new materials that can facilitate many important biomedical and nanoengineering applications, examples including the hybridization of nucleic acids with nanomaterials for gene therapy and biosensing applications. Experimental efforts on producing nano-biomolecular hybrid materials have significantly outpaced theoretical attempts to understand the interactions in these materials and the properties of the hybrids, which is necessary in order to provide guidelines for their systematic design in specific applications. The proposed research program aims at filling the current gap between theoretical investigation and practical applications by (1) in the short term, studying representative nano-biomolecular hybrid materials to improve their performance in corresponding applications; and (2) in the long term, developing effective modeling strategies bridging different scales that can be used to characterize these hybrid materials.