Niels Holten-Andersen, the John Chipman Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, was previously a post-doc at the University of Chicago; his work on cross-linking, self-healing soft matter, and bio-inspired materials will help to move our Department in bold new directions.
Professor Holten-Andersen holds the B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Copenhagen, the B.Sc.Hon. in Molecular Biology from the University of Canterbury, the M.Sc. in Cell Biology from the University of Copenhagen, and the Ph.D. in Biomolecular Science & Engineering from the University of California-Santa Barbara. He writes, “Thanks to hundreds of millions of years of molecular evolution, Nature today presents us with polymers that under ambient pressure and temperature can self-assemble into materials with extraordinary properties such as underwater adhesion and self-healing. In contrast, man-made polymer materials are typically water intolerant, mechanically irreversible and environmentally unfriendly. My long term research goal is to distill the design strategies evolved through biological material adaptation in Nature and use them to expand the material properties of synthetic polymers. In the short term my lab will focus on utilizing a recently discovered biological polymer crosslink mechanism to (I) control polymer mechanics, to (II) establish polymer networks in confined geometries, and to (III) assemble polymer materials with bio-inspired hierarchical designs.”