Polymer Chemistry Blog

Steve Howdle is currently leading his research group in the School of Chemistry, The University of Nottingham, UK. His main research interests are supercritical fluids, biomaterials, polymer modification, polymer composites, nanocomposites and devices. Steve is the chairman of the Macro Group UK, which is a joint interest group of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Society of Chemical Industry. Steve is also coach of the Toton Tigers Under 10s football squad and holds an official coaching award of the English FA.

Please follow the link to get more information about Steve’s research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

Just like many others, I was inspired by some very good chemistry teachers when I was at School – flashes, bangs, flames and smells – all the things that still attract young people to chemistry!

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper?

I’ve been working with supercritical carbon dioxide for most of my career.  The world  has a problem with CO₂ – and a great deal of effort and money is being channelled into collecting and storing it. I think we really ought to be using it!  Some chemists are activating it, some are polymerising it, I think that if just some of that CO₂ could replace other solvents this could have a  large impact which would be very positive for the environment.  But it’s more than that – we have shown that there are many cases where you can carry out a reaction or a process in supercritical CO₂ that you simply cannot achieve in a normal solvent – so there could be very real advantages to using CO₂ – and that has been a major driver for my research recently with applications from polymer and material synthesis through to tissue engineering and drug delivery.

This particular paper is focussed on showing that some new inexpensive  polymers have high solubility in CO₂ and could be used as effective surfactants and stabilisers for CO₂. Up till now, only fluorinated and silicone based materials showed significant solubility, and these can be expensive and are not always environmentally benign. We hope that our paper will show that alternative, cheaper materials could be used, and hence open up more opportunities to exploit supercritical carbon dioxide.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

It’s the first RSC Journal focussed on Polymers, and it really is a natural choice for quite a lot of my research.  This is my first paper in PC – but I’m sure there will be more!

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

The next conference I will be going to is quite unusual – The 6th Scientific and Engineering Conference with International Participation “Supercritical Fluids: Fundamentals, Technologies, Innovations” is being held on the shores of Lake Baikal, Siberia in early July!

How do you spend your spare time?

I have two teenage boys – both competitive swimmers – and I spend a lot of my time ferrying them to training and competitions (I’m writing these answers by the pool!).  I also love football, I still play (for a Veterans’ team) and I also coach kids – I am the manager of the Toton Tigers U13s squad.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?
Football player– but I wasn’t good enough!

Heather D. Maynard received a B.S. with Honors in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a M.S. in Materials Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology was awarded in the summer of 2000 for research in the group of Nobel Prize winner Robert Grubbs. She then moved to the laboratory of Jeffrey Hubbell at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), where from 2000-2002 she was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Maynard joined the UCLA faculty as an Assistant Professor in August 2002 as the first Howard Reiss Career Development Chair in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and as a member of the California NanoSystems Institute.  She is now an Associate Professor.  Maynard’s research interests include polymer synthesis, biohybrid materials, surface modification, and nanomedicine.

Please follow the link to get more information about Heather’s group and her recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?
I have always been curious about how things work and like solving puzzles. In junior high I took a science class with a terrific teacher that covered physics, chemistry, and biology.  Although I enjoyed all of them, it was chemistry that really sparked my interest.  Even then the idea that I could come to understand the world around me at a molecular level and could create new materials enthralled me. At the age of twelve I decided to be a chemistry professor.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C1PY00034A)
One of my main research interests is the synthesis and application of protein-polymer conjugates.  These conjugates are utilized as therapeutics to treat a range of human diseases, so we considered the synthesis and mode of action of known protein therapeutics.  The paper summarizes all of the FDA approved protein-polymer conjugates.  We teamed up with a medical doctor at UCLA to write this review, which describes the synthesis of these materials, as well as the biological activity, administration, and where possible the half-life information.  Since there are many polymer chemists interested in bioconjugates, we anticipated that a concise review of currently used therapeutics would be useful to the community.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?
Polymer Chemistry is an exciting new journal by the RSC, and we were pleased to be invited to take part in a themed issue on Polymer Bioconjugates.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?
I will attend the International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies in Singapore in June and the American Chemical Society Fall National Meeting in Denver.

How do you spend your spare time?
I enjoy spending time with my family and also like to mountain bike.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?
That is a hard question to answer as it is very difficult to imagine myself not a scientist.  Perhaps I would enjoy being an astronaut.

Bert Klumperman is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science in University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Bert is very well known in the Polymer Science field with his studies on understanding the kinetics of radical polymerization reactions. Their research is based on not only mechanistic and kinetic studies but also the synthesis of advanced macromolecular structures for various applications. Please follow the links for further information on Bert’s research group and his current paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?
During secondary school I was very much attracted to science topics (mainly mathematics, biology and chemistry). After initial thoughts on studying biology, I decided to go for chemistry and chemical engineering at Twente University (Netherlands). In my current position in Stellenbosch (South Africa) I get many opportunities to collaborate with scientists in Biochemistry, Microbiology, Pharmacology and the Medical School. I greatly enjoy this direction of my research.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/c1py00069a)
Throughout my career (initial industrial career at DSM Research, later academic career at Eindhoven University of Technology and Stellenbosch University), poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride) (SMA) has always played a big role. It is almost like a red line through my entire career up to this point. In 2009, my colleague Prof Peter Mallon and I supervised a student who worked for a number of weeks on electrospinning of SMA. She showed that there are very interesting possibilities in terms of post-spinning modification. Among the many experiments she tried to immobilize a protein (lysozyme), which seemed to work. In 2010, we continued this work with an Honours student (William Cloete), who immobilized the enzymes described in the paper. In collaboration with a student from Biochemistry (Craig Adriaanse) from the group of Prof Pieter Swart, he carried out the enzyme immobilization and the characterization in terms of enzyme activity. It turned out that such a facile immobilization technique on a solid, high surface area membrane works very well.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?
I already had very positive experience with Polymer Chemistry for the publication of an earlier paper. The layout is done very nicely and, in general, they publish high quality work. It will be very interesting to see what their first Impact Factor (IF) is going to be. I would not be surprised if they manage to compete with the very top journals in the field of Polymer Science in terms of IF. For me at least, Polymer Chemistry will remain a serious candidate for publishing my future work.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?
After a conference in Turkey (Antalya, LRP’11) in mid-April, and one in my home town Stellenbosch (UNESCO/IUPAC Conference on Macromolecules and Materials) at the end of April, the next one will again be in South Africa. From 22-26 May, I will be in Pretoria to attend the 11th International Conference on Frontiers of Polymers and Advanced Materials. After that it will be quiet for a while and I will only attend the ACS National Meeting in Denver (28 August – 1 September), where Prof Kris Matyjaszewski will co-organize the 6th edition of an international symposium on Controlled/Living Radical Polymerization.

How do you spend your spare time?
Ever since I was 10 years old, I have actively played musical instruments. Initially I played the clarinet in a wind orchestra and several smaller bands. When I worked full-time in Eindhoven, I played clarinet in one of the top amateur wind orchestras of the Netherlands (“Koninklijke Harmonie Oefening & Uitspanning” from Beek en Donk) with which I participated in the World Music Contest in Kerkrade (Netherlands) in 1997. Just over 10 years ago, I switched to play the oboe. After a few years of practicing, I started to play the 1st oboe in a small symphony orchestra in Wassenaar (Netherlands), which I did for three years. At that time I had taken up my current position at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), which made it impossible to continue. Currently, I am still taking oboe lessons and at this very moment practicing Mozarts Oboe Quartet in F-major, which I hope to play with a violin, viola and cello in the second half of the year at some informal occasion in Stellenbosch.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?
This is the most difficult question to answer. The most obvious answer would be a professional musician, which in actual fact I have considered at some point. However, also several professions in the medical world would be serious candidates.