News

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

James Nicolas Pagaduan,* Nicholas Hight-Huf, Le Zhou,* Nicholas Dix, Uvinduni I. Premadasa, Benjamin Doughty, Thomas P. Russell,* Ashwin Ramasubramaniam, Michael Barnes, Reika Katsumata,* and Todd Emrick* recently published in ACS Central Science.

This article is entitled "Spatial and Bidirectional Work Function Modulation of Monolayer Graphene with Patterned Polymer “Fluorozwitterists” " and  introduces the fluorozwitterist macromolecular design, which enables the use of a single-component polymer overlayer for simple photopatterning of the work function of graphene to resemble a p-i-n diode

Dipankar Saha*, Ayush Bhardwaj*, Jiacheng Wang, Varun Pande*, Robert Hengstebeck, Peng Bai and James J. Watkins* published research entitled, "Probing Electrocatalytic Synergy in Graphene/MoS2/Nickel Networks for Water Splitting through a Combined Experimental and Theoretical Lens" in ACS Applied Materials Interfaces.

This study investigates the enhanced water splitting performance of graphene/MoS2/nickel networks by combining experimental techniques and theoretical models to understand their synergistic electrocatalytic effects.

Crystallization of Bottlebrush Statistical Copolymers of Polystyrene and Poly(ethylene oxide) was just published by Xuchen, Gan*, Hong-Gyu Seong*, Mingqiu Hu*, Zhan Chen*, Todd Emrick* and Thomas P. Russell* in Macromolecules.