Welcome to our Emerging Investigators Series 2022! This series, led by Prof Shirley Nakagaki (Federal University of Paraná, Brazil) and Dr Fabienne Dumoulin (Acıbadem Mehmet Ali Aydınlar Universit, Türkiye), highlights the very best work from early-career researchers in all areas of chemistry. 10 papers were published as part of the collection spanning the breadth of chemistry on topics ranging from green and environmental chemistry, to biological and bioinorganic chemistry, as well as papers that propose theoretical calculations as solutions to chemistry problems. You can read all about the contributions in this accompanying Editorial prepared by Shirley.
We would like to take this opportunity to highlight an author from the series, Dr Kelly M. Schultz. We interviewed Kelly to find out more about her area of research and her contribution to the series.
Gelation phase diagrams of colloidal rod systems measured over a large composition space
Shiqin He, Marco Caggioni, Seth Lindberg and Kelly M. Schultz
RSC Adv., 2022,12, 12902-12912
Dr. Kelly M. Schultz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. She obtained her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with Professor Eric Furst from the University of Delaware in 2011 as a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. While at Delaware, she was invited to speak in the American Chemical Society Excellence in Graduate Polymers Research Symposium and was selected as the Fraser and Shirley Russell Teaching Fellow. Following her PhD, she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder working in the laboratory of Professor Kristi Anseth. As a postdoc, she was invited to participate in the Distinguished Young Scholars Summer Seminar Series at the University of Washington. She began her position as Assistant Professor at Lehigh University in 2013, was named a P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor from 2016 – 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. Dr. Schultz was named one of TA Instruments Distinguished Young Rheologists (2014), awarded a NSF CAREER award (2018), the Lehigh University Libsch Early Career Research Award (2019), the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science Excellence in Research Scholarship & Leadership (2020), a National Institutes of Health – National Institute of General Medical Sciences Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA R35, 2022) and named the Pirkey Centennial Lecturer by the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (2022). Dr. Schultz and her research group study emerging gel materials developed for applications from consumer products to materials that can enhance and restart wound healing. Of particular interest is the development of bulk and microrheological techniques that measure how 3D encapsulated human mesenchymal stem cells degrade and remodel synthetic hydrogel scaffolds during motility.
Could you briefly explain the focus of your article to the non-specialist (in one or two sentences only) and why it is of current interest?
This work focuses on characterizing the material properties of different formulations of a colloidal fibrous gel. These materials are used in fabric and home care products and this work provides a table where the desired material properties can be looked up eliminating trial-and-error experiments during product development.
How big an impact could your results potentially have?
This work is in collaboration with engineers at Procter & Gamble. We are working with some of their materials but also exploring new materials with similar dimensions that they are interested in using in consumer products. So there is potential for our work to inform the design of new products. To the greater scientific community, this work provides a methodology for tackling material characterization over a large formulation space, which can also have an impact.
Could you explain the motivation behind this study?
As I mentioned in the previous question, this has been a long standing collaboration with Procter & Gamble. We started working with colloidal fibers that they currently use in their fabric and home care products. Since then we have expanded the work to investigate different Fibers to determine if they can also be used as rheological modifiers. Beyond enabling the use of these materials in new products, my group is interested in developing new characterization and analysis techniques. This work uses established characterization techniques to collect data but as you can see in the presentation of the data, we aim to maximize the information we can get from a measurement and that is always a motivation behind our work.
In your opinion, what are the key design considerations for your study?
The key design consideration for our study was to systematically traverse a large formulation space experimentally. Then we wanted to find a way to present this large set of data that would enable a researcher that is working in formulations to use this as a lookup table to inform the design of their product.
Which part of the work towards this paper proved to be most challenging?
The interpretation and presentation of the data was quite challenging. We had a large amount of data and at some point you realize that the more data you have the harder it is to interpret it. Being able to organize it in a way that we could show trends and draw conclusions was really a challenge.
What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment?
This work is evolving to use more sustainable colloidal fibers, something both my group and our collaborators are interested in. This is really exciting since it has the potential to use a waste product in new formulations.
How has your research evolved from your first article to this particular article?
Our first article on this work was developed analysis methods to interpret microrheological data to characterize a heterogeneous colloidal gel. All of the work since that time has built upon this to give us a toolbox of characterization and analysis techniques that allows us to effectively interpret our data, even in complex systems. We have also started characterizing new colloidal gel systems, which are very exciting. Using these techniques and previous knowledge to characterize the rheology of these materials, we hope to enable their use in products.
What is the next step? What work is planned?
As mentioned previously, we are moving on to a sustainable colloid, a waste product. We are characterizing this material to see if we can modify the colloid to enable it’s use as a rheological modifier in fabric and home care products. We are really excited about this work and the direction that the project is taking.
Why did you want to publish in RSC Advances?
We thought that this was not only an interesting study of these particular materials but also a really nice way to characterize, analyze and present this type of data. The reason we chose RSC Advances was because of the wide readership. We thought getting not only the results but the technique to a wider audience would have a bigger impact.
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