2003
MRS Spring Meeting Awards - Outstanding Young Investigator
The Outstanding Young Investigator Award has been established to recognize outstanding interdisciplinary materials research by a young scientist or engineer. This award is presented to Timothy Deming of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for his discovery of synthetic methods to produce polypeptide homopolymers and block copolymers with exquisite control of block length, sequence and secondary structure and the interdisciplinary exploitation of these materials to yield unique hydrogels and inorganic materials. (Find out more about the Outstanding Young Investigator Award)
Timothy Deming
University of California, Santa Barbara
Talk
Presentation
Synthetic
Polypeptides: New Developments in an Old Field
The use of
low-valent metal complexes for the polymerization of alpha-amino
acid-N-carboxyanhydrides (NCAs) will be presented. Details of these
polymerizations will be discussed in addition to studies on the
initial reactions of NCA monomers with the various metals. These
reactions will be analyzed to correlate how the chemistry of different
metals, and different modes of monomer additions, affect the control
of polypeptide formation. Using these initiators, we have prepared
block copolypeptides containing a variety of both hydrophilic and
hydrophobic domains. The hydrophilic chains are composed of either
cationic, anionic, or custom non-ionic residues and the hydrophobic
chains are composed of natural non-polar amino acid residues such
as leucine, valine and phenylalanine. We have studied the self-assembly
of these polymers in aqueous solution using a variety of techniques
and will discuss the self-assembled structures that result as well
as possible biomedical applications of these assemblies.
About the Outstanding Young Investigator Award Winner
Timothy J. Deming
received his BS in chemistry from the University of California,
Irvine, in 1989, and graduated with a PhD in chemistry from the
University of California, Berkeley, under Bruce Novak in 1993. After
a NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, with David Tirrell, he joined the Materials Department
faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995.
He currently holds a joint appointment in the Materials and Chemistry
Departments, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999.
Current research interests include polypeptide synthesis, self-assembly
of block copolypeptides, and biological activity of polypeptides,
for which he has received young investigator awards from the National
Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, The Arnold and
Mabel Beckman Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the
Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
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