ChE’s Sarah Perry Receives $636,834 NSF Award

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Professor Sarah Perry of the UMass Amherst Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department is the principal investigator (PI) on a four-year, $636,834 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her groundbreaking research to engineer materials that can modify the assembly of “surfactants” to improve the usefulness of numerous nano-scale structures. Surfactants are chemical compounds that decrease the surface tension between two liquids, a liquid and a gas, or a liquid and a solid. 

Surfactants, for example, lower the surface tension of liquids, making them useful in various applications that can be found in many products around your home and in industrial settings. Detergents are perhaps the most recognized surfactants, as they help remove dirt and grease from surfaces during washing. 

This NSF project will leverage experiments from Perry and computation from the lab of Professor Charles Sing in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project itself will benefit society and the U.S. by developing a versatile class of biology-inspired materials that can be employed in many chemical, agricultural, and industrial applications.

As Perry describes the backstory to her research, “Molecules can arrange to form larger structures, a process that is key to both complex living tissues and new, advanced materials. For example, scientists have long studied how specific sequences of amino acids fold to create proteins that act as tiny machines. Similarly, surfactants (for example, the molecules in soap) can assemble into spheres, layers, and tubes.” 

According to Perry, “In both cases, the assembled structure is important for practical use. For example, long, tube-shaped surfactant structures help to thicken shampoos while also cleaning hair. However, the ability to form this tube-like structure is usually related to shape of the surfactant molecule itself.” 

In that context, Perry’s NSF project will establish how sequence-controlled polymers can be used for the rational design of surfactant-containing materials. The trailblazing research will leverage “sequence-defined polypeptides” to modulate the assembly of surfactants into a variety of different nano-scale structures with many applications. Polypeptides are polymers of amino acids joined together by peptide bonds, while sequence-defined polypeptides are those in which their sequence is determined by genetic code.

As Perry explains, “The resulting materials will be evaluated by optical and electron microscopy, as well as scattering and rheological methods, to determine the relationship between polypeptide sequence and assembled structure.” 

Perry says that these experimental aspects will be integrated with a modeling effort that connects molecular simulation, colloid science, and polymer-field theory to obtain predictions of assembly in polyelectrolyte-surfactant complexes. 

As Perry summarizes her research, “The overarching goal is to establish a fundamental understanding of how sequenced polypeptides can be used to manipulate the nano-scale structure of bioinspired, surfactant-based assemblies.”

Perry concludes that her NSF research will “generate artificial organelle-like structures for use in applications ranging from biochemistry to bioenergetics, biocatalysis, and biomedicine.”

The Perry Research Group utilizes self-assembly, molecular design, and microfluidic technologies to generate biologically relevant microenvironments for the study and application of biomacromolecules to address real-world challenges. (October 2025)