News

It has long been thought that only nerve and heart cells use electric impulses to communicate, while epithelial cells — which compose the linings of our skin, organs and body cavities — are mute, serving mostly as protective barriers that can absorb and secrete various substances. The Granick Group has upended the status quo by showing that epithelial cells do indeed “talk” to each other, albeit with slow electrical signals. This new discovery, published recently in PNAS could enable new applications for everything from wearable bioelectric sensors to wound healing.

Bottlebrush block copolymers enable the assembly of large, periodic structures, reducing entanglements and speeding up assembly for applications in energy, catalysis, optics, drug delivery, and more!

The article titled, "Opportunities in Bottlebrush Block Copolymers for Advanced Materials" was published in ACS Nano by Watkins Group members Dipankar Saha*, Connor L Witt*, Rida Fatima, Takumi Uchiyama*, Varun Pande*, Dong-Po Song*, Hua-Feng Fei, Benjamin M Yavitt* and James J Watkins*.

ACS Nano

Using a solvent-exchange process pioneered in the Carter group, our team showed how multimodal pore size distributions impact material strength! Using this knowledge we synthesized cellulose xerogels with the highest yield stresses and moduli to date!

This research entitled, "Enhancement of mechanical properties of nanocellulose xerogels using TEMPO-oxidized fibers" by Jerred Wassgren*, Brandon R. Clarke*, M. Bachir Messikh*, Ching-Hsien Ho*, Alfred J. Crosby*, Gregory N. Tew* and Kenneth R. Carter* was recently published in Carbohydrate Polymers.

Carbohydrate Polymers

The EM facility is excited to announce the installation of a brand-new state-of-the-art Tundra cryo-transmission electron microscope (cryo-EM)! This instrument is designed for accessibility and efficiency, offering unparalleled insights into materials and enabling researchers to visualize native structures, defects, and interfaces with remarkable resolution. To learn more, visit https://corum.umass.edu/facilities/electron-microscopy, or contact Alexander Ribbe or Emily Agnello.

Hong-Gyu Seong, Todd Emrick and Thomas P. Russell recently published an article entitled "Degradable polyolefins prepared by integration of disulfides into metathesis polymerizations with 3,6-dihydro-1,2-dithiine" in Chemical Science. In this work a 6-membered disulfide-containing cyclic olefin was synthesized via one-step RCM and used in ROMP copolymerizations with various cyclic olefins.

Zhongyuan Li, Ayush Bhardwaj*, Jinlong He, Wenxin Zhang, Thomas T. Tran, Ying Li, Andrew McClung, Sravya Nuguri*, James J. Watkins*, and Seok-Woo Lee recently published a paper in Nature Communications. In this work, carbon nanopillars were made with nanoimprint lithography utilizing bottlebrush block copolymers (BBCPs) and a carbon precursor. These resulting pillars exhibited unprecedented strength, deformability, and damping capability for a material with its density, partly due to observed hybridization changes of the carbon atoms.

Special Issue in the Journal of Polymer Science, 2024, pp 3585-3869 dedicated to research and education in polymers at UMass Amherst. We thank all of the PSE student, postdoc, faculty, and alumni authors of articles in this special JPS issue, and to JPS Editor (and PSE alumnus) Dr. Joseph Krumpfer! We especially thank Todd Emrick for organizing this editorial!

The accelerating growth and societal importance of polymers span academic disciplines—chemistry, engineering, physics, materials, and interfacial science—and now penetrate critically important aspects of healthcare, energy

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Laurel Kroo will be joining the Department of Polymer Science & Engineering as our newest Assistant Professor in 2025. Dr. Kroo will be launching a research group that specializes in the design and programming of micro-structured fluids, to tackle global challenges in sustainability, heath and manufacturing. 

Sravya M. Nuguri*, Daniel Shreiber, Benjamin Cerjan, Vincent Einck*, Naomi J. Halas, Mark H. Griep, James J. Watkins* recently published their research in Advanced Optical Materials. The paper is entitled, Stretchable Metamaterials with Tamm/Fano Resonances for Tunable, Efficient Mechanochromic Color Shifting. 

In this work James J. Watkins and co-workers report the fabrication of a strain-tunable, mechanochromic, color-shifting device by the combination of scalable nanoimprint lithography with layer-by-layer assembly. The integration of stretchable Bragg stack with gold and aluminum