Stimuli-Responsive Materials

Introduction: Living organisms are soft materials that change properties and function in response to their surroundings. Plastics, in contrast, typically do not have this advanced capability. We are devising various strategies to impart stimuli-responsive properties to soft materials, with the goal of generating materials that more closely resemble the advanced capabilities of living things.

Representative Publications:

“Stimuli-Responsive Polymer Film that Autonomously Translates a Molecular Detection Event into a Macroscopic Change in Its Optical Properties via a Continuous, Thiol-Mediated Self-Propagating Reaction”, Mohapatra, H.; Kim, H.; Phillips, S. T.*, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 12498–12501.

“Polymeric materials that convert local fleeting signals into global macroscopic responses”, Kim, H.; Baker, M. S.; Phillips, S. T.*; Chem. Sci. 2015, 6, 3388–3392.