Highly Ordered Polymeric Materials via a Monomer Self-Assembly Approach

9625433 Gin这份职业补助金详细介绍了首席研究员的研究和教育计划：描述了一项致力于合成新型聚合物材料的研究计划，以及研究生和本科教育的几种新方法。除了化学结构外，实现材料内在性质的最重要因素之一是在小尺度上扩展有序。分子水平上的顺序，如结晶度，允许材料中分子之间的合作相互作用，以改善宏观水平上的性质。然而，在材料科学中，合成聚合物和复合材料通常通过合成后加工(即拉伸对准)获得不同程度的有序性。作为材料化学家，我们想要解决的问题之一是，我们是否可以通过组成分子的结构设计来控制或诱导材料中的体有序，而不是通过合成后加工。具体地说，我们感兴趣的是探索使用基于液晶的自组织单体作为高度组织化的介质来构建各种复杂的聚合物材料。我们将这种方法应用于材料研究的两个领域：(1)合成有序和体积对称性可在分子尺度上控制的新型压电聚合物。(2)合成高度有序的聚合物复合材料，其中纳米尺度的几何形状可以通过液晶基质单体预先确定。提出了改进本科生和研究生化学教育的几点设想。在这些想法中，有一种是本科生化学教育的模块化方法，学生将能够选择他们有兴趣学习的主题，按照他们想要的任何顺序。这将模仿模块化化学联盟(MC2)的专题讲座，以及NSF赞助的模块化教学计划，旨在开发和评估本科课程头两年的模块化化学教学方法。***

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. ***