Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

Themed Collection: Microneedles

Meet the Guest Editors

Journal of Materials Chemistry B and companion journal Biomaterials Science are pleased to promote their themed collection on ‘Microneedles’.

This cross-journal themed collection on ‘Microneedles’ aims to bring together recent advancements in the field of microneedles that readers will find informative and useful. The collection includes work related to microneedle fabrication and development approaches, applications of microneedles that add a new dimension to existing core knowledge in the microneedles field, sensing applications and clinical studies that evaluate efficacy or other aspects of microneedle use in humans.

Read the collection here

The Guest Editors for this themed collection are: Ester Caffarel-Salvador, Ryan Donnelly, Harvinder Gill and Hyungil Jung

Find out more about the Guest Editors below:

Dr. Ester Caffarel-Salvador is a multidisciplinary scientist with a background in biotechnology and biochemistry. At MIT, she developed a pill to administer insulin orally, now in clinical trials, which led the MIT Technology Review to recognize her as one of the 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2019.

After taking a mini-MBA at Harvard and working across startups, VCs, consulting, and pharmaceutical companies, Ester is now the Associate Director of Strategic Innovation for Rare Diseases at Chiesi USA. She is also a lecturer at MIT and an advisor to several startups. Ester speaks seven languages and is passionate about advocating on career development for women in science.

Professor Ryan Donnelly holds the Chair in Pharmaceutical Technology at Queen’s University Belfast and is Director of QUB’s interdisciplinary research programme Materials & Advanced Technologies for Healthcare (MATCH). His personal research is centred on design and physicochemical characterisation of advanced polymeric drug delivery systems for transdermal and intradermal drug delivery, with a strong emphasis on improving patient outcomes. He is currently developing a range of novel microneedle technologies through independent research, but also in collaboration with several major pharma partners. He has obtained substantial UK Research Council, charity and industrial funding and authored over 600 peer-reviewed publications (H-index = 73), including 6 patent applications, 6 textbooks, 23 book chapters and approximately 300 full papers. He has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences. Professor Donnelly is Europe/Africa Editor of Drug Delivery & Translational Research and the Controlled Release Society’s Communications Chair. He has won the Academy of Pharmaceutical Science’s Innovative Science Award (2020), the Controlled Release Society’s Young Investigator Award (2016), BBSRC Innovator of the Year and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists Pharmaceutical Research Meritorious Manuscript Award (2013 and 2022), the GSK Emerging Scientist Award (2012) and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Science Award (2011).

Dr. Gill is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA. His research interests are in the fields of immunoengineering and micro-nano medicine. He has expertise in delivery systems such as microneedles, pollen grains, polymeric micro-nano particles, and gold nanoparticles. He has a history of innovativeness, and of providing fresh and unique perspectives to research and medical problems. Dr. Gill is working towards the development of a universal influenza vaccine using nanoparticle systems to enhance vaccine efficacy. He is amongst the pioneers of microneedle technology and has produced seminal work in the field. He was also the first to propose use of pollen grains as “Trojan horses” for oral vaccination and has published original and seminal papers in this field, which has attracted other researchers. He is also the pioneer of the use of microneedles for allergen immunotherapy and his lab is currently developing microneedles for the treatment of airway and peanut allergen immunotherapies. This technology is being commercialized through a startup company called Moonlight Therapeutics, which Dr. Gill has co-founded.

Dr. Gill completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering with honors and a gold medal from Panjab University, India (1994). After graduation, he worked in the petroleum industry for seven years. Subsequently he obtained his doctoral degree in Bioengineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (2007). Dr. Gill received his postdoctoral training in the field of influenza vaccines at Emory University (2009). Dr. Gill has received numerous awards and honors, including the prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2 award) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for his pollen research, Chancellor’s Council Distinguished Research Award, Barney E. Rushing, Jr. Faculty Distinguished Research Award STEM, Ed and Linda Whitaker Faculty Fellow Award, and Whitacre Engineering Research Award. For his accomplishments and contributions to Biomedical Engineering, he was awarded the Whitacre Endowed Professorship in Science and Engineering at Texas Tech.

Hyungil Jung is a Professor in the Department of Biotechnology at Yonsei University, where he is also the Chair of the Bio & Living Engineering Major in Global Leaders College, as well as Director of the Institute of Bio-Medical Health Care Convergence and the Department Head of Integrative Biotechnology & Translational Medicine. He is also the founder and CSO of JUVIC Inc., a company developing microneedle-based products. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Yonsei University in 1993 and 1995, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2002. He worked at Caltech as a Postdoctoral scholar from 2002 through 2004 and then joined Yonsei University at 2004. His main interests lie in commercialization of microneedles and overcoming the pressing challenges in microneedle development for commercialization. During his spare time, his hobby is indulging in board games, his favorite being Baduk, a widely popular traditional board game in Korea.

Circularly Polarised Luminescence (CPL):

Chirality is a basic property of Nature and plays an important role in the Universe (homochirality of living systems). Chiral materials are also widely used in many areas, such as medicines and chemical reagents, catalysts, and emitters. Interestingly, chiral emitters can display circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) which is the difference of left- and right-circularly polarized light components from chiral compounds and has recently revealed many fundamental interests and potential applications. The increasing recent interest of CPL technique is attributed to instrumental development, enabling development of strongly CPL-active chiral materials or systems, and to its application in many research areas such as in bio-responsive systems and for the development of smart materials for advanced photonic and electronic technologies (quantum computing, optical data storage and 3D displays, etc).

The aim of this themed collection is to bring together cutting-edge original articles regarding the synthesis, preparation and characterization, the theoretical simulations, the circular dichroism (CD) and CPL measurements of chiral molecules or systems including organic, inorganic materials and supramolecular aggregates with fluorescence, thermally activated delayed fluorescence, phosphorescence and long after-glow properties. Furthermore, the application of these materials in organic light-emitting diode (OLED), etc., are particularly welcome. The themed collection will provide a guidance for the future rational design of chiral molecules or systems suitable for various CPL properties and applications.

We encourage submission of CPL studies on all types of chiral molecules or systems, in form of reviews or of research papers. Both experimental, theoretical and combinations works are welcome.

Submissions to the journal should contain chemistry in a materials context and should fit within the scope of Journal of Materials Chemistry C. Please see the journal’s website for more information on the journal’s scope, standards, article types and author guidelines.

If you are interested in contributing to this themed collection, please submit through the online submission system for Journal of Materials Chemistry C. 

Any questions, please get in touch with the Editorial Office by email.

Note:

Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when you submit your manuscript to say that this is a submission for the themed collection. The Editorial Office and Guest Editors reserve the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection and inclusion of accepted articles in the collection is not guaranteed. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s usual peer review process. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the collection as soon as they are online, and they will be published in a regular issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

We are honoured to introduce a special cross-journal collection of Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Sustainable Energy & Fuels in memoriam of Prof. Alasdair James Campbell.

Alasdair, or ‘Al’ as he was known to his colleagues, students and friends, was an exceptional scientist who made considerable impact in the fundamental research of state-of-the-art display technologies, printed photodetectors and transistors, neuromorphic computing and organic biomedical sensors. His work influenced the fields of materials chemistry, bioelectronics and materials science by providing the mechanistic understanding and methods to exploit underlying solid-state physics phenomena.

Guest Edited by Natalie Stingelin and Garry Rumbles, it is a great honour to highlight contributions from a number of Al’s friends, students and colleagues that were at the core of Al’s scientific activity, covering the fields where he had such impact: organic electronics (OLEDs, OFETs and photodetectors), charge transport in organic semiconductors, chiral optoelectronic materials, neuromorphic computing, and biomedical sensors based on organic materials, to celebrate Al’s life and science. His friends, students and colleagues will forever remember Al’s science, his kindness and his humour.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection of papers in Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Sustainable Energy & Fuels in honour of Prof. Al Campbell. All of the articles in the collection are free to access until 20 July 2022.

Journal of Materials Chemistry C is delighted to announce a call for papers for its latest themed collection on “Stability of Optoelectronic Materials and Devices” Guest Edited by: Yana Vaynzof (Technical University of Dresden), Zhuoying Chen (ESPCI Paris/CNRS/Sorbonne Université/Université PSL) and Dinesh Kabra (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay).

Emerging optoelectronic materials are under intense scrutiny both in terms of their fundamental properties and application in a range of electronic devices. These include, among others, organic materials, quantum dots, metal halide perovskites, metal oxides, 2D materials. These materials have already found application in solar cells, light-emitting diodes, field-effect transistors, photodetectors, lasers and many more. While the function and performance of these devices are highly important, their stability also needs to be addressed if these technologies are to find their way to industrial applications. In this themed collection, we focus on the latest insights regarding the fundamental mechanisms of material degradation, the study of active-material/device stability and the development of mitigation strategies both in terms of chemical design and device architecture engineering.

This call for papers is open for the following article types:

• Communications
• Full papers

Submission Deadline: 30th September 2022

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, you can submit your article directly through the journal’s online submission service at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmchemc. Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when uploading your files to say that this is a contribution to the themed collection. The Editorial Office reserves the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection, and inclusion of accepted articles in the final themed collection is not guaranteed.

Guest Editors: Chris Pickard (University of Cambridge, UK), Jörg Behler (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany), and Krishna Rajan (University at Buffalo, USA)

In this themed collection, we invite contributions in materials informatics. Manuscripts are encouraged in topics ranging from novel computational and experimental methods to state-of-the-art applications.

The discipline of Materials Informatics has emerged from a fusion of increasing availability of materials data, high throughput experimental and computational methods, first principles and other advanced materials models, and machine learning. It has been fuelled by the dramatic growth in available computational power, and its ubiquity.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection please get in touch with the Editorial Office by email.

Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when you submit your manuscript to say that this is a submission for the themed collection. The Editorial Office and Guest Editors reserve the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection and inclusion of accepted articles in the collection is not guaranteed. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s usual peer review process. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are online, and they will be published in a regular issue of Materials Advances.

In this themed collection, we will collect primary research and review articles from across the area of biomass materials. Manuscripts are encouraged from a broad range of topics related to biomass materials including synthesis/processing, biological-synthetic interfaces, characterization, properties, degradation and end-of-life, lifecycle/economic analysis, and application studies.

Biomass was used by humans to formulate some of the earliest polymers, and contemporary environmental concerns have served as the impetus for the researchers and industry to return to biomass as precursors for engineered materials. Biomass materials are now poised to re-emerge as materials of construction across a range of applications that currently employ synthetic plastics and materials. In adapting biological compounds and materials for use in synthetic systems, the desired biological compound or material of interest is almost always found in extremely complex mixtures of structurally- and functionally-diverse molecules and macromolecules which are impossible to separate. Furthermore, completely removing all water from many biological compounds and materials causes them to lose the desired structure, property, or function of interest. To address these challenges and facilitate this shift in materials usage, interdisciplinary research spanning fundamental understanding of synthesis and properties to translational studies for targeted applications is needed.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection please get in touch with the Editorial Office by email.

Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when you submit your manuscript to say that this is a submission for the themed collection. The Editorial Office and Guest Editors reserve the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection and inclusion of accepted articles in the collection is not guaranteed. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s usual peer review process. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are online, and they will be published in a regular issue of Materials Advances.

We invite you to read a new themed collection in Materials Advances on chiral nanomaterials.

We are pleased to inform you that this new themed issue has now been published online.

Read the collection

Guest Edited by Nicholas A. Kotov (University of Michigan, USA), Luis M. Liz-Marzán (CIC biomaGUNE, Spain), and Qiangbin Wang (SINANO, China).

Chiral nanostructures is one of the most rapidly developing research fields encompassing chemistry, physics, and biology. The rise to academic prominence of chiral nanostructures was fuelled by their giant optical activity and the fundamental structural parallels between biotic and abiotic structures with mirror asymmetry. This themed collection provides a snapshot of concepts being developed by a diverse spectrum of scientists around the world working in chiral nanostructures from metals, semiconductors and ceramics. Many fundamental discoveries in this area are expected that are likely to encompass multiscale chirality transfer, chiral surfaces, biological signalling, and circularly polarized emitters. Technological applications being pursued along the way of fundamental studies include biosensing, healthcare, chiral photonics, and sustainable catalysis.

Articles in the collection are published in Materials Advances and they are all freely accessible with open access. A small selection of articles from the collection are provided below.

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