Dr. Christopher Li
Professor Christopher Li has been awarded a four-year $488,000 National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research grant for his project “Polymer Crystallization at Curved Liquid/Liquid Interface.”
Curved space is incommensurate with typical ordered structures with three-dimensional (3D) translational symmetry. In this project, Li proposes to investigate packing crystalline polymer chains in a curved incommensurate space using an emulsion-solution crystallization method. If successful, the well-controlled single- or multiple-component ensembles will not only shed light on using polymeric capsules for drug delivery and gene therapeutics, they can also be extremely useful for applications such as catalysis, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and artificial nanomotors.