Principal Investigator George Stephanopoulos
Research in nanoscale science and engineering has been primarily directed towards the design and manufacturing of
(a) materials with passive nanostructures (e.g. nanostructured coatings, dispersion of nanoparticles, and bulk nanostructured metals, polymers and ceramics), and
(b) active devices with nanostructured materials (e.g. transistors, amplifiers, targeted drugs and delivery systems, actuators and adaptive structures). Research on the design, fabrication and operation of integrated “nanoscale factories”, i.e. processes with unit operations and materials movement among these units at the nanoscale, along with the requisite energy supply system and monitoring and control infrastructure, is lagging seriously behind. It is progress at this frontier that will enable the research visions of molecular factories, synthetic cells and adaptive devices (e.g. artificial tissues and sensorial systems, nanosystem biology for health care and agricultural systems2, scalable plasmonic devices, chemico-mechanical processing, targeted cell therapy and nanodevices, human-machine interfaces at the tissue and nervous system level) to become reality.
Integration of functional nanoscale units into a coherent process with specific overall functionality and behavior is a new frontier in process systems engineering. The absence of a concise systems theory for the engineering of such integrated supramolecular factories compounds the inherent physical and chemical difficulties of their design and fabrication. Creative exploitation of hydrogen bonding, p-stacking, electrostatic and/or hydrophobic-hydrophilic interactions has led to deliberate and purposeful molecular tectonics,yielding a fast growing repertory of supramolecular structures with exquisite precision and functionalities, which can and have been used as molecular reactors, separators, molecular tubes, motors, shuttles or pumps for the transport of materials, molecular gates or channels for the selective propagation of molecules, etc.
In this research program we attempt to systematically design molecular architectures and the ensuing functional nanostructured systems.