Polymer Chemistry Blog

Eric Drockenmuller was born in 1973 in Thionville (France), and received his PhD degree in 2002 from the University of Strasbourg (France) after working on nitroxide-mediated radical polymerization. He undertook a two years postdoctoral position with Prof. C. J. Hawker (IBM Almaden Research Center, California, USA) and Prof. T. P. Russell (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) working on the synthesis and functionalization of nanostructured materials. He was appointed Assistant Professor in 2004 and full Professor in 2011 at the University of Lyon 1 (France). Since October 2010 he has been a junior member of the “Institut Universitaire de France” (IUF).

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

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

Among science topics chemistry has always been my favourite as it is very visual and requires a good memory to assimilate all different reactions and mechanisms. I converged to polymer and materials chemistry after attending an invited seminar which made me realize how important they are in our daily life. I always liked building up things starting from scratch or basic building blocks, like a fancy lego game for grown-ups. I appreciate very much the creativity and interactions involved in the daily life of a researcher in polymer chemistry.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/c0py00251h)

As a polymer chemist I thought that if matching functionalities were found at polymer chain-ends and at a substrate’s surface, things would easily result in surface functionalization. After initiating a fruitful collaboration with Profs. Liliane Léger and Yves Grohens I realized that physics needed to be considered more carefully. Therefore together we pushed beyond our knowledge of the grafting of poly(ethylene glycol) brushes to silicon substrates using click chemistry.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

We were invited to contribute to a special issue guest edited by Rachel O’Reilly and Andrew Dove in this new promising journal.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I will attend the Aquitaine conference in Bordeaux (France) next October, the EUPOC conference in Doha (Qatar) in January 2012. I also have the honour to co-organize a symposium at the IUPAC 2012 conference together with Profs. Craig Hawker and Axel Muller in June 2012.

How do you spend your spare time?

Besides movies, gigs or travels, I have practiced skateboard since I was 16 and go to the Lyon indoor skatepark with my son every Friday night (when I’m not injured as I’m getting old).

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

I always dreamt of being a professional skateboarder.

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.