Polymer Chemistry Blog

Ben Zhong Tang received his B.S. degree from South China University of Technology and Ph.D. degree from Kyoto University. He conducted postdoctoral research at University of Toronto and worked as a senior scientist in the central laboratory of NEOS Corp. He joined the Department of Chemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology as an assistant professor in 1994 and was promoted to chair professor in 2008. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009. He received a Natural Science Award from the Chinese Government and a Senior Research Fellowship Award from the Croucher Foundation in 2007. He is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of RSC Polymer Chemistry Series, Editor of Polymer Bulletin, and News Contributor to Noteworthy Chemistry, an ACS electronic newsweekly.

Please follow the link for further information on Ben’s laboratory and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

Many people become chemists because they love chemistry. This is not true in my case. I become a chemist because I was assigned to study chemistry. I was sort of an all-round pupil, good in almost every subject I had to learn at school, except for sports. When I took the entry examination for college study, I was chosen by a university and assigned to a major I did not apply for. Many people do things for which they have passion, but my approach is different: I cultivate my interest in the things I must do. This was largely true before I became an independent researcher as a faculty in Hong Kong. My motto is “enjoy doing the things I need to do”. This quality has enabled me to have a joyful career and quality life. I am proud of eventually becoming a chemist. I am happy to “play” with molecules everyday now that may lead to the creation of new knowledge, new materials, new technology…

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/c2py00586g)

My research group has been interested in developing new polymerization reactions using alkyne monomers as building blocks. It has been a natural extension for us to study “click” polymerization. When Dr. Anjun Qin was working in my lab in Hong Kong as a postdoctoral associate, he successfully utilized click reaction to synthesize poly(triazole)s. The click polymerization, however, has to use metallic catalysts, which causes such problems as poor solubility of the polymers due to the complexation of the catalytic species with the triazole moieties in the reaction products and the difficulty in completely removing the catalyst residues that are adversely affect the physical, especially optical, properties of the polymers. Dr. Qin is now a faculty at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, helping me run my research lab at the university. We worked with our students in Hangzhou and Hong Kong with a motivation to develop metal-free click polymerization. The work is exciting because we can now prepare functional poly(triazole)s with high regioregularity (F_1,4 up to ~95%) in high yields (up to 100%) by simple heating in the absence of a metallic catalyst.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

I am serving as a science news contributor to Noteworthy Chemistry, an ACS electronic newsweekly. I constantly read research papers published in many journals. Although Polymer Chemistry is a new journal, the papers it has published have attracted my attention because of their high quality. I have thus decided to send our work to Polymer Chemistry for publication. The review and publication have been fast. It has been a pleasant experience to communicate with the Editors.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I will attend the 44th IUPAC World Polymer Congress in Virginia on 24–29 June 2012 and the 244th ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia on 19–23 August 2012.

How do you spend your spare time?

Do aerobics, play tennis, sing songs, or listen to music.

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

I liked literature and arts when I was young. I might choose poet, novelist, painter or singer as my profession if I had choice.

Andy Cooper obtained his Ph.D at the University of Nottingham in 1994 for the study of organometallic reaction mechanisms. He then held an 1851 Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, working on polymerization reactions and phase transfer processes in supercritical fluids (1995–1997). He next held a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in Cambridge, working on heterogeneous polymerizations in supercritical CO₂ (1997–1999). He joined the University of Liverpool in January 1999 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, where he now holds a personal chair. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery (established in 2007) and was a cofounder of a spin-out company, IOTA NanoSolutions, in 2005. He was Head of Chemistry and then Head of the School of Physical Sciences in the period 2007–2011. In addition to research in polymer chemistry, he has interests in crystal engineering, colloid science, and chemical problems related to energy.

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

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

The constant albeit small chance of discovering something really remarkable and important, this is what makes research so exciting.

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

We published our first paper on conjugated microporous polymers (CMPs) in 2007 (Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2007, 46, 8574). There have been several nice follow-up studies since, but the most interesting have exploited the combination of extended conjugation and porosity in these materials. For example, one of the best papers in this area was published last year by Prof. Donglin Jiang (Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2011, 50, 8753) describing supercapacitive CMPs that rival nanocarbons. For these applications it will be important to control both porosity and also physical properties related to conjugation, such as optical band gap or charge mobility.  In this new study, we set out to synthesize triazine analogues of our first CMP materials. We found that the materials, while amorphous, were ‘isoreticular’ in the sense that changing from benzene to triazine nodes does not affect the microporosity.  The triazine CMPs, however, showed slightly higher CO₂ uptakes and optical band gaps that can be varied by copolymerization.   Variation of band gap could be useful in applications like photocatalysis.  Prof. Wenbin Lin at UNC has shown that related materials are good photocatalysts.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

I’ve found that the RSC journals have fast publication times and good editing and refereeing.  I’m sure Polymer Chemistry will not be an exception.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

2012 ACS meetings (both Spring and Fall), Pott Shrigley, and of course Warwick 2012.

How do you spend your spare times?

I haven’t had time for ‘hobbies’ as such for years, but I did recently take up mountain biking.  Perhaps this signifies a mid-life crisis…

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

A stunt man.  You get to live in a trailer.

Sabine Beuermann studied chemistry and received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in the group of Michael Buback at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. After working as a visiting scientist at the DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington/DE, she returned to Göttingen to work on her habilitation, which was finalized with the habilitation thesis on homogeneous phase polymerizations in supercritical carbon dioxide and the venia legendi for Technical and Macromolecular Chemistry. Since 2006 she is professor of Polymer Chemistry at the University of Potsdam. Current research interest include synthesis, characterization, and modification of vinylidene fluoride polymers, polymerizations in supercritical carbon dioxide or ionic liquids, reversible deactivated radical polymerizations, functionalization of nanoparticles or fullerenes with fluorinated polymers, and detailed investigations into the kinetics of radical polymerizations. Since 1996 she is a member of the IUPAC Subcommittee on “Modeling of Kinetics and Processes of Polymerization”.

Please follow the link for further information on Sabine’s laboratory and her recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C1PY00427A)

Initially, we started to look into vinylidene fluoride polymerizations, because I was interested in the kinetics and to use supercritical carbon dioxide as an environmentally friendly reaction medium. Since the very first PhD student working on this topic, M. Imran-ul-haq, had a background in organic chemistry he also started with the functionalization to an azide. Because of its ferro-, piezo, and pyroelectric properties there are many advanced applications for PVDF. Of particular interest are systems with separated PVDF domains, e.g. voids in PVDF or layer formation due to self-aggregation. From this point it was pretty obvious to think about the synthesis of block copolymers with PVDF. However, with the exception of iodine transfer polymerizations vinylidene fluoride is not well suited for reversible deactivated radical polymerization and thus, there were almost no reports on PVDF block copolymers. Obviously, using polystyrene as a second block was only the starting block. We are now working on block copolymers with a number of other polymers.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

Although being a young journal Polymer Chemistry is already well-recognized and the fraction of articles I am interested in is comparably large. Moreover, I like the design of the articles, and the “clean” structure of the homepage. After publication of the article I can also add that the whole process was very fast and went very smoothly.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I am most excited on attending the 20th International Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry in Kobe in July, because it will be my first trip to Japan. In addition, I will go to the Freiburger Makromolekulares Kolloquium in February, the Polymer Reaction Engineering conference in May and probably to MACRO2012 in June.

How do you spend your spare times?

In my spare time I try to make as little plans in advance as possible. I enjoy walking in the beautiful parks and surroundings of Potsdam, trips to the North or Baltic Sea and visiting family.

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

Maybe a historian, but I am very happy with the choice I made.