Past Event

Re-Stream: Sustainable Materials

Plastics and Pavements

March 27, 2025
11:00 PM EDT/ March 28 12:00 PM JST
Re-Stream: Sustainable Materials
Leading Edge

Location

Zoom Webinar

Overview

In this Leading Edge Webinar, we explore sustainable versions of two of the most prevalent, yet sometimes overlooked materials in our modern daily life: polymers and concrete. Polymers are as ubiquitous as plastics and have wide applications in packaging, car parts, medical products, electronics, glues/paints/coatings/lubricants, and countless other industries. Yet, they can be tough on the environment because they are not always quickly or safely biodegradable. Likewise, concrete has been used for millennia in construction, but producing it can produce huge amounts of globally warming carbon dioxide (CO2).

What if we could make these two everyday materials more sustainable? What might sustainable polymers look like, and how can we efficiently search for sustainable polymers among a myriad of potential candidates? Likewise - can we make concrete do more than just serve as a structural material – is it possible to store carbon dioxide, sequester it in concrete itself to offset its carbon footprint – or even store energy – in ordinary buildings and pavements?

Join Prof. Bradley Olsen of MIT’s Chemical Engineering Department, and Prof. Admir Masic of MIT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, as they investigate these possibilities.

  • Overview

    In this Leading Edge Webinar, we explore sustainable versions of two of the most prevalent, yet sometimes overlooked materials in our modern daily life: polymers and concrete. Polymers are as ubiquitous as plastics and have wide applications in packaging, car parts, medical products, electronics, glues/paints/coatings/lubricants, and countless other industries. Yet, they can be tough on the environment because they are not always quickly or safely biodegradable. Likewise, concrete has been used for millennia in construction, but producing it can produce huge amounts of globally warming carbon dioxide (CO2).

    What if we could make these two everyday materials more sustainable? What might sustainable polymers look like, and how can we efficiently search for sustainable polymers among a myriad of potential candidates? Likewise - can we make concrete do more than just serve as a structural material – is it possible to store carbon dioxide, sequester it in concrete itself to offset its carbon footprint – or even store energy – in ordinary buildings and pavements?

    Join Prof. Bradley Olsen of MIT’s Chemical Engineering Department, and Prof. Admir Masic of MIT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, as they investigate these possibilities.


Agenda

11:00 PM

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Corey Cheng
Program Director

Dr. Corey Cheng joined the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) as an Senior Industrial Liaison Officer in December 2011. He has broad interests in science and technology, and uses his technical research experience to better serve ILP members in Asia and the United States.

Cheng spent six years in industrial research at Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, where he contributed to sound compression (Dolby Digital, AAC, MP3), wireless networking, fingerprinting, and spatial/“3-D audio” technologies. Later, he was Associate Professor and Director of the undergraduate and graduate programs in music engineering technology at the University of Miami, Florida, where he also held a dual appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cheng holds various U.S. and international patents, has published technical papers, and has presented at various conferences. His technical work includes collaborations and consulting work with the U.S. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, Fujitsu-Ten USA, Starkey Laboratories, America Online, and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). Cheng was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Circuits and Systems Society from 2009-2010, and was a Westinghouse (Intel) Science Talent Search national finalist many years ago.

Cheng holds degrees in Electrical Engineering (Ph.D., M.S.E. University of Michigan), Electro-Acoustic Music (M.A. Dartmouth College), and physics (B.A. Harvard University).

Personally, Dr. Cheng is an American Born Chinese (ABC), serves as his family’s genealogist, and traces his roots back to Toi San, Guang Dong Province and Xing Hua, Jiang Su Province, China. He also has a background in music, and his electro-acoustic compositions have been presented at various U.S. and international venues.

11:03 PM

Polymer Informatics and High-Throughput Experimentation to Help Us Discover New Sustainable Polymers

Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor, Department Executive Officer, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering

Olsen
Bradley Olsen

Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor, Department Executive Officer, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering

Professor Olsen earned his S.B. in Course 10 (Chemical Engineering) from MIT in June 2003. His undergraduate research with Prof. Karen Gleason focused on understanding the polymerization kinetics of initiated chemical vapor deposition reactions to produce fluorocarbon and organosiloxane polymer coatings for biopassivation and hydrophobic surfaces. He also performed research in analytical food chemistry at General Mills, pressure sensitive adhesives for waterproofing membranes at W.R. Grace, and reactive extrusion and green process development for polymer foam insulation at Dow. He was recognized with the Alpha Chi Sigma award and a Goldwater Scholarship for his undergraduate achievements.

Professor Olsen moved to Berkeley for his graduate work, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in December 2007. He was a Hertz Fellow, a Tau Beta Pi Fellow, and the first student of Prof. Rachel Segalman. His research developed the first universal phase diagram for rod-coil block copolymers, an emerging category of polymers with importance for producing self-assembled nanomateirals in biotechnology and organic electronics. In addition, he addressed several issues in rod crystallization within nanostructures, thin film self-assembly of rod-coil systems, and surface reconstruction in polymer films. His research was recognized as a Padden award finalist at the American Physical Society March meeting in 2008.

After finishing his Ph.D., Prof. Olsen was an NIH and Beckman Insitute Postdoctoral Fellow with Profs. David Tirrell, Julia Kornfield, and Zhen-Gang Wang at Caltech. He applied protein biosynthesis to the design of physically associating telechelic protein hydrogels which were applied as injectable biomaterials. Joint theoretical and experimental investigations were used to gain insight into the properties and design rules governing these systems.

Olsen's interest in polymer science has been longstanding, starting with a high school science fair project on conductive dendrimer films. His current research interests are broadly clustered in the areas of soft condensed matter physics and macromolecular physics, including liquid crystals, biomaterials, colloids, and polymers. He is particularly interested in how biosynthesis can be used as a natural green chemistry for the preparation of designer polymeric materials, how controlled polymerization through biology can give us unique materials that provide insight into polymer physics, and the unique physics of self-assembly in complex protein nanostructures for biotechnology and energy applications. When Prof. Olsen is not doing science, he enjoys underwater photography, hiking, and travel.

Areas of Interest and Expertise
- Block Copolymers
- Soft Condensed Matter Physics
- Protein-Based Materials
- Bioelectronics, Biomaterials and Energy Applications
- Polymer Physics, Including Intelligent Design of Materials
- Controlled-Assembly Processes Incorporating Proteins to Control Polymer Structure

Recent Projects
07/10/13 Artificial Chlorosomes for Controlled Exciton Transport
07/10/13 Co-Assembly in Di-Block Copolymer-Nanoparticle Mixtures
07/10/13 Diffusion of Entangled Rod-Coil Block Copolymers
07/10/13 Exploring the Interactions Governing Globular Protein-Polymer Block Copolymer Se
07/10/13 Responsively Nanostructured Injectable Protein Hydrogels
07/10/13 Self-Assembled of Globular Protein-Block-Polymer Block Copolymers
07/10/13 Synthetic Physically Crosslinked and Thermoresponsive Gels
07/10/13 Theoretical Design Considerations for Development of Nanostructured Biomaterials
10/09/13 Self-Assembly of Fusion Proteins to Form Biofunctional Materials

Featuring: The CRIPT Polymer Database and BigSmiles Polymer Data Representation.

The exponential rise in the production and use of plastics, particularly in single-use applications, has led to a dramatic increase in their environmental prevalence and problems with plastic waste management.  One necessary component of the solution to this challenge is developing plastics that degrade more effectively when they are accidentally released into the environment, an unavoidable occurrence at some level in any practical waste handling system.  Although biodegradation is believed to be a function of chemical structure and therefore should be amenable to quantitative structure-property methods such as group contribution theory or more recent machine learning approaches, the field is plagued by a lack of data.  Herein, we report the adaptation of the clear zone assay from molecular biology to the high-throughput screening of biodegradation that can overcome long test times of standardized methods and enable a large biodegradation data set to explore structure-property relationships.  We report the synthesis and biodegradation testing of thousands of different polyesters, polyurethanes, and polyamides and the development of new machine learning models to predict polymer biodegradation based on this data-driven by our BigSMILES line notation.  The data is organized into the Community Resource for Innovation in Polymer Technology (CRIPT) platform to make it widely available according to FAIR data standards, demonstrating the utility of these tools for big polymer data projects. 

11:32 PM

Multifunctional Concrete
Admir Masic
Admir Masic

Admir Masic is Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Masic’s research focuses on the science-enabled engineering of sustainable construction materials for large-scale infrastructure innovation. A chemist by training, with expertise in biomineralization, he specializes in the development of multifunctional cement-based materials, ranging from self-healing concrete materials to carbon absorbing concretes and electron conducting cement-based materials. He is a principal investigator in the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, a faculty fellow in Archaeological Materials at MIT’s Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), and the faculty director of the Refugee ACTion Hub (ReACT) at MIT. MIT ReACT aims at providing new professional content development for displaced learners around the world. 

Featuring MIT Startup Exchange’s DMAT Corp.: Self-Healing and Low Carbon Concrete.

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world, and because of its carbon- and energy-intensive production, it is responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. For this reason, we need to entirely rethink concrete’s future and develop new methods to reduce its carbon footprint. In this webinar, we will discuss recent innovations in the production of “multifunctional concrete,” ranging from new formulations that act as carbon sinks, to Roman-inspired self-healing concretes, and electrically conductive cements. These science-enabled developments all aim to make multifunctional concrete part of the solution for the sustainable development of our built environment in an ever-changing world. 

11:58 PM

Closing Remarks
Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Corey Cheng
Program Director

Dr. Corey Cheng joined the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) as an Senior Industrial Liaison Officer in December 2011. He has broad interests in science and technology, and uses his technical research experience to better serve ILP members in Asia and the United States.

Cheng spent six years in industrial research at Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, where he contributed to sound compression (Dolby Digital, AAC, MP3), wireless networking, fingerprinting, and spatial/“3-D audio” technologies. Later, he was Associate Professor and Director of the undergraduate and graduate programs in music engineering technology at the University of Miami, Florida, where he also held a dual appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cheng holds various U.S. and international patents, has published technical papers, and has presented at various conferences. His technical work includes collaborations and consulting work with the U.S. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, Fujitsu-Ten USA, Starkey Laboratories, America Online, and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). Cheng was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Circuits and Systems Society from 2009-2010, and was a Westinghouse (Intel) Science Talent Search national finalist many years ago.

Cheng holds degrees in Electrical Engineering (Ph.D., M.S.E. University of Michigan), Electro-Acoustic Music (M.A. Dartmouth College), and physics (B.A. Harvard University).

Personally, Dr. Cheng is an American Born Chinese (ABC), serves as his family’s genealogist, and traces his roots back to Toi San, Guang Dong Province and Xing Hua, Jiang Su Province, China. He also has a background in music, and his electro-acoustic compositions have been presented at various U.S. and international venues.

12:00 AM

Adjournment
  • Agenda
    11:00 PM

    Welcome and Opening Remarks
    Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
    Corey Cheng
    Program Director

    Dr. Corey Cheng joined the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) as an Senior Industrial Liaison Officer in December 2011. He has broad interests in science and technology, and uses his technical research experience to better serve ILP members in Asia and the United States.

    Cheng spent six years in industrial research at Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, where he contributed to sound compression (Dolby Digital, AAC, MP3), wireless networking, fingerprinting, and spatial/“3-D audio” technologies. Later, he was Associate Professor and Director of the undergraduate and graduate programs in music engineering technology at the University of Miami, Florida, where he also held a dual appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cheng holds various U.S. and international patents, has published technical papers, and has presented at various conferences. His technical work includes collaborations and consulting work with the U.S. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, Fujitsu-Ten USA, Starkey Laboratories, America Online, and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). Cheng was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Circuits and Systems Society from 2009-2010, and was a Westinghouse (Intel) Science Talent Search national finalist many years ago.

    Cheng holds degrees in Electrical Engineering (Ph.D., M.S.E. University of Michigan), Electro-Acoustic Music (M.A. Dartmouth College), and physics (B.A. Harvard University).

    Personally, Dr. Cheng is an American Born Chinese (ABC), serves as his family’s genealogist, and traces his roots back to Toi San, Guang Dong Province and Xing Hua, Jiang Su Province, China. He also has a background in music, and his electro-acoustic compositions have been presented at various U.S. and international venues.

    11:03 PM

    Polymer Informatics and High-Throughput Experimentation to Help Us Discover New Sustainable Polymers

    Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor, Department Executive Officer, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering

    Olsen
    Bradley Olsen

    Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor, Department Executive Officer, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering

    Professor Olsen earned his S.B. in Course 10 (Chemical Engineering) from MIT in June 2003. His undergraduate research with Prof. Karen Gleason focused on understanding the polymerization kinetics of initiated chemical vapor deposition reactions to produce fluorocarbon and organosiloxane polymer coatings for biopassivation and hydrophobic surfaces. He also performed research in analytical food chemistry at General Mills, pressure sensitive adhesives for waterproofing membranes at W.R. Grace, and reactive extrusion and green process development for polymer foam insulation at Dow. He was recognized with the Alpha Chi Sigma award and a Goldwater Scholarship for his undergraduate achievements.

    Professor Olsen moved to Berkeley for his graduate work, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in December 2007. He was a Hertz Fellow, a Tau Beta Pi Fellow, and the first student of Prof. Rachel Segalman. His research developed the first universal phase diagram for rod-coil block copolymers, an emerging category of polymers with importance for producing self-assembled nanomateirals in biotechnology and organic electronics. In addition, he addressed several issues in rod crystallization within nanostructures, thin film self-assembly of rod-coil systems, and surface reconstruction in polymer films. His research was recognized as a Padden award finalist at the American Physical Society March meeting in 2008.

    After finishing his Ph.D., Prof. Olsen was an NIH and Beckman Insitute Postdoctoral Fellow with Profs. David Tirrell, Julia Kornfield, and Zhen-Gang Wang at Caltech. He applied protein biosynthesis to the design of physically associating telechelic protein hydrogels which were applied as injectable biomaterials. Joint theoretical and experimental investigations were used to gain insight into the properties and design rules governing these systems.

    Olsen's interest in polymer science has been longstanding, starting with a high school science fair project on conductive dendrimer films. His current research interests are broadly clustered in the areas of soft condensed matter physics and macromolecular physics, including liquid crystals, biomaterials, colloids, and polymers. He is particularly interested in how biosynthesis can be used as a natural green chemistry for the preparation of designer polymeric materials, how controlled polymerization through biology can give us unique materials that provide insight into polymer physics, and the unique physics of self-assembly in complex protein nanostructures for biotechnology and energy applications. When Prof. Olsen is not doing science, he enjoys underwater photography, hiking, and travel.

    Areas of Interest and Expertise
    - Block Copolymers
    - Soft Condensed Matter Physics
    - Protein-Based Materials
    - Bioelectronics, Biomaterials and Energy Applications
    - Polymer Physics, Including Intelligent Design of Materials
    - Controlled-Assembly Processes Incorporating Proteins to Control Polymer Structure

    Recent Projects
    07/10/13 Artificial Chlorosomes for Controlled Exciton Transport
    07/10/13 Co-Assembly in Di-Block Copolymer-Nanoparticle Mixtures
    07/10/13 Diffusion of Entangled Rod-Coil Block Copolymers
    07/10/13 Exploring the Interactions Governing Globular Protein-Polymer Block Copolymer Se
    07/10/13 Responsively Nanostructured Injectable Protein Hydrogels
    07/10/13 Self-Assembled of Globular Protein-Block-Polymer Block Copolymers
    07/10/13 Synthetic Physically Crosslinked and Thermoresponsive Gels
    07/10/13 Theoretical Design Considerations for Development of Nanostructured Biomaterials
    10/09/13 Self-Assembly of Fusion Proteins to Form Biofunctional Materials

    Featuring: The CRIPT Polymer Database and BigSmiles Polymer Data Representation.

    The exponential rise in the production and use of plastics, particularly in single-use applications, has led to a dramatic increase in their environmental prevalence and problems with plastic waste management.  One necessary component of the solution to this challenge is developing plastics that degrade more effectively when they are accidentally released into the environment, an unavoidable occurrence at some level in any practical waste handling system.  Although biodegradation is believed to be a function of chemical structure and therefore should be amenable to quantitative structure-property methods such as group contribution theory or more recent machine learning approaches, the field is plagued by a lack of data.  Herein, we report the adaptation of the clear zone assay from molecular biology to the high-throughput screening of biodegradation that can overcome long test times of standardized methods and enable a large biodegradation data set to explore structure-property relationships.  We report the synthesis and biodegradation testing of thousands of different polyesters, polyurethanes, and polyamides and the development of new machine learning models to predict polymer biodegradation based on this data-driven by our BigSMILES line notation.  The data is organized into the Community Resource for Innovation in Polymer Technology (CRIPT) platform to make it widely available according to FAIR data standards, demonstrating the utility of these tools for big polymer data projects. 

    11:32 PM

    Multifunctional Concrete
    Admir Masic
    Admir Masic

    Admir Masic is Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Masic’s research focuses on the science-enabled engineering of sustainable construction materials for large-scale infrastructure innovation. A chemist by training, with expertise in biomineralization, he specializes in the development of multifunctional cement-based materials, ranging from self-healing concrete materials to carbon absorbing concretes and electron conducting cement-based materials. He is a principal investigator in the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, a faculty fellow in Archaeological Materials at MIT’s Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), and the faculty director of the Refugee ACTion Hub (ReACT) at MIT. MIT ReACT aims at providing new professional content development for displaced learners around the world. 

    Featuring MIT Startup Exchange’s DMAT Corp.: Self-Healing and Low Carbon Concrete.

    Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world, and because of its carbon- and energy-intensive production, it is responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. For this reason, we need to entirely rethink concrete’s future and develop new methods to reduce its carbon footprint. In this webinar, we will discuss recent innovations in the production of “multifunctional concrete,” ranging from new formulations that act as carbon sinks, to Roman-inspired self-healing concretes, and electrically conductive cements. These science-enabled developments all aim to make multifunctional concrete part of the solution for the sustainable development of our built environment in an ever-changing world. 

    11:58 PM

    Closing Remarks
    Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
    Corey Cheng
    Program Director

    Dr. Corey Cheng joined the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) as an Senior Industrial Liaison Officer in December 2011. He has broad interests in science and technology, and uses his technical research experience to better serve ILP members in Asia and the United States.

    Cheng spent six years in industrial research at Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, where he contributed to sound compression (Dolby Digital, AAC, MP3), wireless networking, fingerprinting, and spatial/“3-D audio” technologies. Later, he was Associate Professor and Director of the undergraduate and graduate programs in music engineering technology at the University of Miami, Florida, where he also held a dual appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cheng holds various U.S. and international patents, has published technical papers, and has presented at various conferences. His technical work includes collaborations and consulting work with the U.S. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, Fujitsu-Ten USA, Starkey Laboratories, America Online, and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). Cheng was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Circuits and Systems Society from 2009-2010, and was a Westinghouse (Intel) Science Talent Search national finalist many years ago.

    Cheng holds degrees in Electrical Engineering (Ph.D., M.S.E. University of Michigan), Electro-Acoustic Music (M.A. Dartmouth College), and physics (B.A. Harvard University).

    Personally, Dr. Cheng is an American Born Chinese (ABC), serves as his family’s genealogist, and traces his roots back to Toi San, Guang Dong Province and Xing Hua, Jiang Su Province, China. He also has a background in music, and his electro-acoustic compositions have been presented at various U.S. and international venues.

    12:00 AM

    Adjournment