Polymer Chemistry Blog

Dr. Marcus Weck is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Associate Director of the Molecular Design Institute at NYU.  Before joining NYU in 2007, he was a member of the faculty in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  He received his M.S. degree (diploma) from the University of Mainz, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Helmut Ringsdorf. Dr. Weck obtained his Ph.D. degree in organic and polymer chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 under the direction of Professor Robert H. Grubbs.  The same year, he joined the group of Professor George M. Whitesides at Harvard University as a German Academic Exchange Service Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Weck’s research interests are in the areas of organic and polymer chemistry as well as materials science.  Emphases include: 1) the development of novel synthetic methodologies for copolymer functionalization and their applications in materials science, 2) biological inspired materials, 3) the synthesis of complex polymers for biomedical applications, 4) polymeric organic light-emitting diodes, and 5) the use of soluble supports in catalysis. His research accomplishments have been recognized with the following awards: Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, NSF CAREER Award, Blanchard Assistant Professor Award, 3M-Nontenure Faculty Award, DuPont Young Professor Award, Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, a CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

Please follow the link for further information on Marcus’ research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

This goes back a long time. In high school, I was only really good in chemistry and biology. Both topics came naturally and I loved them. In particular doing hand-on experiments was great and really inspiring. Therefore, I decided to study chemistry. Unfortunately, my first 2-3 years of undergrad education in Germany was anything but exciting, motivating or inspiring. Thankfully, I made the right choice and joined the Ringsdorf group for my diploma thesis. Helmut is an amazing and motivating advisor and I was hooked again. During my PhD studies at Caltech in Bob Grubbs’ group I was always sure that I would go back to Germany and work in industry. It was actually Bob who suggested to me that I should consider academics.

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

My group is fascinated by the challenge to develop polymeric supports for well-defined catalysts that allow the catalytic reaction to proceed with higher activities and potentially higher selectivities than using the original homogeneous catalyst. We are always in search for new support systems that allow for higher catalyst activities and/or selectivities. We view shell-crosslinked micelles (SCM) as unique catalyst supports since they can be varied and tuned easily and allow for easy functionalization with catalytically active moieties in the core (thereby creating a nanoreactors) and/or the periphery (allowing for easy access of substrate in the aqueous solvent). The SCMs described in the article are based on poly(norbornene)s since my group has a long history of the use of living ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) to create block copolymers for a variety of applications. In the Polymer Chemistry publication, we employ the hydrolytic kinetic resolution (HKR) using Co-salen catalysts which was developed by Eric Jacobsen at Harvard over a decade ago as the benchmark catalytic transformation.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

I view Polymer Chemistry as one of the premier polymer journal in the world (RSC was lacking a polymer journal for a long time). In general, I try to vary the journals I submit my research group’s work to. Often the audience is slightly different and it is important to us to disseminate our work broadly.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

In March I will be at the Spring ACS meeting in San Diego and in January I am heading to Qatar for the14th international IUPAC Conference on polymers.

How do you spend your spare times?

Before the end of July, I would spend my spare free time listening to classical music at home or going to the opera in NYC. In July, my wife and I welcomed our first kid. At this point, my spare time is changing diapers and trying to get some sleep.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

I would LOVE to be a music conductor. Listening to classical music allows me to relax (it also helps to write papers and proposals). Unfortunately, I do not play any instruments and would be a lousy conductor.

Patrick Stayton currently serves as the Washington Research Foundation Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington.  He received his B.S. in Biology (summa cum laude) from Illinois State University in 1984, his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois in 1989, and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, also at the University of Illinois.

Dr. Stayton’s eclectic research group works at the interface of fundamental molecular science and applied molecular bioengineering.  His laboratory has fundamental projects aimed at elucidating the basic principles underlying biomolecular recognition, and connected projects applying these principles to medical applications in the drug delivery, point-of-care diagnostics, and regenerative medicine fields. He has published over 200 scientific papers.  Dr. Stayton has a strong interest in translating the group’s research, has been awarded several patents, and is a co-founder of the startup companies PhaseRx Inc. based on his group’s drug delivery work, and Nexgenia based on their diagnostic work.

Dr. Stayton has been elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and has been the recipient of the Clemson Award from the Society For Biomaterials and the CRS-Cygnus Recognition Award from the Controlled Release Society. He served as Co-Chair of the Gordon Conference on Drug Carriers in Medicine and Biology in 2010.  He has also been awarded the 2009 Faculty Research Innovation Award, UW College of Engineering, a Distinguished Teacher and Mentor Award from the Department of Bioengineering, and an Honorary Award from the College of Engineering’s Minority Science and Engineering Program.

Please follow the link for further information on Patrick’s research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

I was always in love with the intersection of biology, chemistry, and physics and found that if you could make macromolecules and engineer their structure and function that you could open up lots of interesting science problems that were connected to translational medical opportunities too.  I guess I  always find my creativity stimulated by these science discipline intersections, the science and technology intersections, the academic and industry intersections, and of course the underlying people intersections of different backgrounds that I find so energizing.  I love how macromolecules and (bio)polymers look, how they work thermodynamically and dynamically, and trying to engineer new ones that have interesting activities.

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

We are very enthused about the idea that polymers might be designed and constructed to have bioactivities connected to delivering biologic drugs to intracellular targets.  This led us to the idea that polymers having pH-dependent, membrane-destabilizing activities might alter the intracellular trafficking of protein antigens in such a way as to promote more cytosolic delivery and entry into the immune pathway connected to cytotoxic T-lymphocyte activation.  It is particularly important that the polymer chemistry field has come up with so many  new ways to make more defined and biofunctionalized polymers and I think we are inspired to see work from around the world that  has so many biomedical ramifications. We tried in this paper to move toward a more defined diblock polymer design to control the architecture of the bioactive portion of the carrier and separate it from the segment containing the vaccine antigen.  We think this will move it to a more realistic and defined polymer-protein vaccine species that could be moved preclinically. However, it must be noted that the activity while good is not yet ideal and there are lots of important challenges and opportunities to do better designs and more active compositions, and of course understand how this intersects with the complex immunology.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

I’ve been very impressed by the startup quality of the papers in the journal, but not so surprised given the high quality of the editors and journal staff, and we were excited to be part of the special issue on polymer bioconjugates.  We will definitely be submitting again.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I should be at the Controlled Release Society annual meeting and the ACS national meeting in the next couple months.

How do you spend your spare time?

I play with my best pal and friend, my 8 year old son, whom I’m glad to say shows all the signs of being a scientist too someday, and then I love to ride bikes and will be up early every morning watching the Tour de France this month– I’ve gone a couple times to watch and ride my bike up some of those mountain passes on the same day as the race, it is an incredible atmosphere and wow are they steep and long, you deserve all the french food and wine after those days….

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

I think I would be a starving artist and writer but the great thing about science is you can still do that on the side and not be quite so starving.

Richard Hoogenboom was born in 1978 in Rotterdam (Netherlands) and studied chemical engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e; Netherlands). In 2005, he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Ulrich S. Schubert (TU/e) and continued working as project leader for the Dutch Polymer Institute. The final two years of this appointment were combined with a part-time position as senior product developer at Dophys Medical BV. After postdoctoral training with Martin Möller at the RWTH Aachen (Humboldt fellowship; 2008-2009) and Roeland J. M. Nolte at the Radboud University Nijmegen (NWO veni-grant; 2009-2010), he was appointed as associate professor at Ghent University mid 2010 where he currently heads a research group on Supramolecular Chemistry. His research interests include stimuli-responsive polymers, supramolecular polymers, and poly(2-oxazoline)s.

Please follow the link for further information on Richard’s research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

My decision to study chemical engineering was a trade off between my love for maths, physics and chemistry at high school. In the end I choose a study that combined all these topics. During my studies I was greatly attracted by organic chemistry inspired by the courses given by Bert Meijer and, despite being at a technical university, I ended up graduating in organic and polymer chemistry.

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

The Polymer Chemistry paper reports cloud point tuning of biocompatible poly(2-oxazoline)s by attaching glucose substituents to the side chains via thiol-ene addition. This work was motivated by my interest in developing novel methods for the synthesis of functional poly(2-oxazoline)s as well as my interest in adaptive materials. In addition, the resulting glycopolymers are attractive biomaterials for interaction with sugar-binding proteins, namely lectins. The beauty of this work lies in the unexpected lowering of the water-solubility of the copolymers upon incorporation of hydrophilic sugar moieties. This once more shows how little we actually understand about adaptive materials that are not only governed by hydrophilicity, but also by non-covalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding in this work.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

Despite being a very young journal, in my opinion Polymer Chemistry has already evolved into a well-established polymer journal that is well-recognized by the community. Therefore, publishing our work in Polymer Chemistry ensures wide exposure of our work. In addition, publication in Polymer Chemistry is accompanied by a fast and smooth evaluation and publication process.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

In September I will attend the APME 2011 (IUPAC 9th International Conference on Advanced Polymers via Macromolecular Engineering) in Cappadocia, Turkey.

At the 2012 ACS Spring Meeting in San Diego, CA, I will organize a symposium on ‘Poly(2-oxazoline)s and related pseudo-polypeptide structures’ together with Helmut Schlaad and Scott Grayson, where our just published work on glyco-poly(2-oxazoline)s also will be presented.

How do you spend your spare times?

My spare time is mostly spent with my family. It is great to play with my kids of 1 and 3 years and to see how they discover the world around them. To stay a bit in shape after too much time spend behind a computer in the office, you will find me at least one time a week on the tennis court.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

This is a very difficult one. I guess I would still be a scientist, but in a different discipline.

Yasuyuki Tezuka is Professor of Tokyo Institute of Technology.  He is a graduate of The University of Tokyo, and received his doctorate degree from Ghent University (Belgium) in 1982.  He then joined Nagaoka University of Technology (Japan) as an assistant professor.  In 1994, he moved to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and has been a professor since 2003 in the Department of Organic and Polymeric Materials.  He received Tokyo Tech Award of Best Teacher, 2004, and The Award of the Society of Polymer Science, Japan (2010).  He has served as an Asian Editor of Reactive and Functional Polymers since 2006.  His current research is focused on topological polymer chemistry, in particular on the design of topologically unique macromolecular architectures, and of novel polymer materials by their topology effects.

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

What attracted you to follow a life-course to become a chemist?

Almost 30 years ago in 1979, I left Tokyo to join in a lab in a Belgian university as a doctorate student.  That time was still good-old-days for university research in Europe.  I was fascinated by and decided to pursue academic course.  Therefore, I was not smart enough to anticipate a rapid change of university researches into a hungry-business.  I feel now, however, that I was lucky to go with chemistry, in particular synthetic polymer chemistry, offering excitement to create something so small and invisible but convincingly proved and eventually testable in macroscopically.  I am also thankful for my respectful mentors to encourage me to follow chemistry as a life-long amusing business.  Thus, I gratefully acknowledge Professors, Teiji Tsuruta, Shohei Inoue and Eric Goethals.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C1PY00088H)

A class of macromolecular constructions having single-cyclic (ring) or multi-cyclic polymer units has been a synthetic challenge, though they are regarded geometrically primitive due to their small junction and terminus numbers.  For more than a decade we have been fascinated and involved in a project to make them smartly despite their immediate applications unforeseeable.  In our review in Polymer Chemistry, we have shown recent synthetic breakthroughs and I am happy to include our own, namely an electrostatic self-assembly and covalent conversion (ESA-CF) process among such developments.  Topological Polymer Chemistry has now provided innovative opportunities, not only to bring new insights in the frontier of basic polymer chemistry and physics, but also to disclose unusual properties and functions based on their cyclic topologies, i.e., topology effects, unattainable either by linear or branched counterparts.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

I am thankful to Prof. Barner-Kowollik, an editorial board member of the journal to offer us a valuable opportunity to summarize recent achievements in Topological Polymer Chemistry.  Also, I am impressed by a variety of competitive measures continuously introduced by the journal, through which this relatively young journal has promoted quickly into the leading position.

In which upcoming opportunities may our readers meet you or catch up your work ?

We are still experiencing prolonging aftermath of rare disasters caused not only by natural but also by human origins.  We are now rebuilding ourselves quickly back to normal university life, to welcome overseas colleagues for scientific visits to us in Tokyo.  Meanwhile, I am now working to edit a book, which hopefully becomes a follow-up of a seminal work of the late Dr. Semlyen (Cyclic Polymers, 2nd Ed).  The title of the Book will be; Topological Polymer Chemistry / The progress in cyclic polymers: Synthesis, Properties and Functions.

How do you spend your spare times?

Taking care of, and hoping to better communicate with B – -, a selfish cat at home, with only occasional success.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

A teenager, at the student-riot period of 1960-70s in Japan, was likely a follower of such now-passed stars like, Shuji Terayama (an avant-garde artist, as well as a haiku- and tanka-poet writer), Yasujiro Odzu (movie director) in addition to Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, – –

Martina Stenzel studied chemistry at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, before completing her PhD in 1999 at the Institute of Applied Macromolecular Chemistry, University of Stuttgart, Germany. With a DAAD scholarship (German Academic Exchange Service) in her pocket, she started working as a postdoctoral Fellow at the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. In 2002, she took on a position as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and worked within the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) on complex polymer architectures via RAFT polymerization and honeycomb structured porous films. In 2007, she got promoted to Associate Professor and in the following year obtained a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship. Her research interest is focused on the synthesis of functional polymers with complex architectures such as glycopolymers and other polymers for biomedical applications, especially polymers with in-built metal complexes for the delivery of metal-based anti-cancer drugs. She is currently the past-chair of the Polymer division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and editor of the Australian Journal of Chemistry.

Please follow the link for further information on Martina’s research group and her recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

I really enjoyed chemistry at school and having a great chemistry teacher helped. I took chemistry as a main subject and I choose as my subject assignment a topic on antibiotics. Reading about discoveries and advancement in this area absolutely fascinated me and I decided that this is my destiny. Unfortunately, I never worked with antibiotics. Maybe I should combine antibiotics with polymers, here is an idea….!

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

We are on a quest to figure out what is the best possible polymer structure to achieve highest binding while we only need very small amount of sugar. Synthesis of certain carbohydrates can be very tedious and we don’t want to “waste” any active molecules. We therefore thought that the design of a flexible spacer allows the sugar to move around like an octopus to find the lectin receptor.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

The reviewing process is highly efficient, you know the outcome of your submission in less than three weeks. In addition, Polymer Chemistry has a lot of exposure, I think it is already on the “to read” list of a lot of polymer scientists.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I will be at the European Polymer Federation in Granada, at the Asian Cyclodextrin Conference in Australia and the Polymer Pacific Federation in Korea. Unfortunately, Australia is a long way away and travelling is not so easy.

How do you spend your spare time?

I have two little children, my “spare” time involves swings, the zoo and listening to “baa baa black sheep” at least twenty times in a row. If I have time though, I enjoy reading a good novel and books on medieval history. I also enjoy bush walking and sight seeing.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

I love astronomy! I could imagine myself gazing into the stars for a living.

Cameron Alexander received degrees (BSc and PhD) in Chemistry from the University of Durham, UK, and carried out post-doctoral research at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, University of Cambridge. He took up an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship before moving to the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham in June 2005. Professor Alexander was promoted to a personal Chair in Polymer Therapeutics at Nottingham in 2009, where he is also Head of the Division of Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering, and Operations Director of the EPSRC/AstraZeneca/University of Nottingham Doctoral Training Centre in Targeted Therapeutics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Materials Chemistry, and has published more than 100 refereed articles. Research in his group centres on the synthesis of responsive/‘smart’ materials for biomedical applications. Professor Alexander is currently an EPSRC Leadership Fellow (2009-2014) in the area of personalised medicines.

Please follow the link for further information on Cameron’s research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

I have always been fascinated by science, but have also always felt that practical value and application are important, hence the study of chemistry and my subsequent move into polymers and pharmaceutical materials. As is no doubt the case with many career scientists I was lucky to have great chemistry teachers and mentors throughout my career, from school, through an industry gap year with Ciba-Geigy, then at university in Durham and on to my current position at Nottingham. In chemistry and related disciplines, you have a chance to be creative, work with a whole range of amazing people and ideally, do something that is of value to others. We try to inspire in turn, and again I have been lucky to be part of Brady Haran’s fantastic Test-Tube project at Nottingham (see http://www.test-tube.org.uk/). The Periodic Table videos he has done with Martyn Poliakoff, Pete Licence and others are an inspiration in themselves.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C1PY00128K)

In a School of Pharmacy we combine fundamental and applied science interests, and modifying the properties of natural materials with polymers fits into both categories. In addition to their intended roles in biology, many biopolymers, and especially proteins, might act as powerful drugs but they are often too easily degraded to be used in a standard injectable formulation. Decorating proteins with polymers can enhance their stability as well as increase their circulation time in the body, but also can reduce their intended activity too. By attaching polymers that can collapse or expand dependent on a stimulus, we intend to keep the enhanced stability of the polymer-protein conjugate, but switch the enzyme back to a highly active state when needed by collapsing the attached polymer. Here we developed methods to modify trypsin, a well-known protease, but in ways that allowed the chemistries to be done entirely in aqueous media, and with polymer architectures that allowed us to play with the way the polymer-trypsin conjugate assembled in solution. In turn, this allowed us to direct the activity of the enzyme – though of course not to the extent that we intended!

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

In part it was because it was a Themed Issue but also because the journal is becoming the go-to site for the polymer science that most overlaps with what we are doing. The Editorial Board are all strongly involved in the more multidisciplinary aspects of polymer science, so it makes sense for us to send our papers to Polym. Chem. as, if we get past the reviewers, the science will be very visible.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I will be at the Materials Chemistry 10 Conference (Manchester, July 2010), the UK PharmSci meeting (Nottingham, September 2011) and the International Symposium on Stimuli-Responsive Materials (Hattiesburg, Mississippi) in October 2011 talking about responsive polymers.

How do you spend your spare time?

Pre-children days my spare time involved mountain walks, trying to play drums and a bit of volunteering for Amnesty International but now the realities of combining science with young(ish) children means the concept of spare time is pretty nebulous. However, I do manage the occasional attempt at playing squash and plan to hit a drum kit badly for the amusement or otherwise of delegates at next year’s Warwick Polymer meeting.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

Mountain guide in Scotland – no contest.

Patrick Theato studied chemistry at the University of Mainz (Germany) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA), and obtained his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. R. Zentel at the University of Mainz in 2001. In 2002, he was awarded a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation and joined the group of Prof. D.Y. Yoon at Seoul National University (Korea), where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow, followed by a short research stay at Stanford University (USA) with Prof C.W. Frank. In 2003, he joined the University of Mainz as a young faculty member and completed his Habilitation in 2007. Since 2009 he holds a joint appointment with the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University within the World Class University (WCU) program. In 2011 he accepted a prize senior lectureship at the University of Sheffield (UK). Shortly after he moved to University of Hamburg (Germany), accepting a tenured associate professorship for polymer chemistry. His current research interests include the defined synthesis of reactive polymers, block copolymers, design of multi stimuli-responsive polymers, versatile functionalization of interfaces, hybrid polymers, polymers for electronics and templating of polymers.

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

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

Chemistry was my first love. Probably as every student, I was captivated by the fact that chemistry comes with a big bang and a lot of smoke. Who doesn’t remember his first explosion (those planned and those that happened surprisingly)? Seriously, from the first day on in middle school, I was fascinated by the art of creating something on a molecular level. Even though the concept of “molecular level” did not reveal itself to me during those early days. Besides, I was fond of the logic behind this art. The happy marriage of art and crafts-work is what I call chemistry and this motivates me even today.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C0PY00314J)

Oh, I like this paper very much! It represents our very first approach of taking our expertise in post-polymerization modification chemistry, which we have mastered previously on the molecular level, to construct nanometer-sized objects. When it comes to nanoobjects, most approaches presented in the literature focus on the chemistry first and then utilize “self-assembly” of the building blocks into the desired nanoobject. We took the other way around. We first focused on the creation of the nanoobject (in the present case utilizing a templating approach) and then applied our post-polymerization modification strategies to dial-in the desired chemistry of the nanoobject. As we can control the dimensions and the chemical functionality of the nanoobject independently, it allows us to take the concepts from the synthesis of single polymer chains to the level of nanoobjects.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

Polymer Chemistry was launched very recently, and I have to admit that I was rather skeptical at first about yet another journal. But once you look at the contents of the journal in more detail, you will realize that the journal indeed fills a gap that existed for a long time. The chance to concentrate on pure synthetic polymer chemistry is thrilling and an aspect that hardly any other high impact journal offers. I am convinced that it will be one of the top journals when it comes to polymer synthesis. Therefore it was a logical choice for our synthetic paper.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

There are plenty of chances to meet me. Probably too many! [“laughs”]

The next conferences are Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition in Montreal, Canada, the Gordon Research Conference for Polymers in South Hadley, USA, the ACS Fall meeting in Denver, USA, the 12^th Pacific Polymer Conference on Jeju, Korea, and a couple of more small meetings. But readers may always feel free to contact me by email.

How do you spend your spare times?

Spare time? What is that? The rare moments of spare time I enjoy being with my family, travelling, cooking (interestingly, most chemists are good cooks) or fidgeting something on my computer.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

Either being a comedian, a computer scientist or in any other way being a happy person.