Congratulations to Kelsie Wentz and Steven Chapman for being named Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship recipients! Kelsie's awarded project in the Klausen lab is "Hybrid Inorganic-Organic Polymers with Embedded Silicon Radicals". Steven's awarded project in the Kalow lab is "Photoresponsive Cross-Linkers for Multifunctional Adaptive Materials".

Haley has successfully defended her thesis, "Synthesis, Characterization, and Theory of Polymer Gels to Elucidate Topology-Property Relationships". Congratulations Dr. Beech!

The team had a fantastic meeting in Chicago to present our progress to the review panel. We followed with a day to talk about new collaborative research opportunities.

The Olsen and Craig labs examine linear rheological properties of supramolecular polymer networks formed by mixtures of two different cross-linkers. Article Link

A collaborative effort from ten(!) MONET researchers have been selected to be featured in ACS Editors’ Choice, sponsored for immediate, open access by ACS due to its potential for the broad public interest. It is an honor given to only one article from the entire ACS portfolio each day of the year. PolyDAT: A Generic Data Schema for Polymer Characterization Tzyy-Shyang Lin, Nathan J. Rebello, Haley K. Beech, Zi Wang, Bassil El-Zaatari, David J. Lundberg, Jeremiah A. Johnson, Julia A. Kalow, Stephen L. Craig, and Bradley D. Olsen Article Link

We know now what a molecular substituent effect on reactivity might feel like to the touch, thanks to this work by Shu, Haley, and colleagues! Read all about it in a work just published in J. Am. Chem. Soc. Mechanism Dictates Mechanics: A Molecular Substituent Effect in the Macroscopic Fracture of a Covalent Polymer Network Shu Wang, Haley K. Beech, Brandon H. Bowser, Tatiana B. Kouznetsova, Bradley D. Olsen, Michael Rubinstein, and Stephen L. Craig Article Link

Please join the free Multiscale Mechanochemistry and Mechanobiology seminar featuring Jeff Moore and colleagues on Feb. 15 at 9:00 a.m. EST. Registration is free but required.

The Art of Polymers Concert from our collaboration with Multiverse Concert Series is now available online. Thanks to everyone that made this great performance possible.

Art of Polymers celebrates the 100th anniversary of artificial polymers in a concert of music and science, in collaboration with the MONET Project. Biodegradable plastics, building materials that change color under stress, structures that flex and unlock rather than break: these are our hopes for the future of polymers. Together, scientists and musicians will explore these ideas in a concert mixing lecture with acoustic instruments (natural polymers) and musical robotics from the WPI Perception and Robotics Lab. January 29, 2021 @ 7:00PM EST Anyone can get tickets here for this Zoom concert event.

Vitrimers are a class of covalent adaptable networks (CANs) that undergo topology reconfiguration via associative exchange reactions, enabling reprocessing at elevated temperatures. Here, we show that cross-linker reactivity represents an additional design parameter to tune stress relaxation rates in vitrimers. Guided by calculated activation barriers, we prepared a series of cross-linkers with varying reactivity for the conjugate addition—elimination of thiols in a PDMS vitrimer. Surprisingly, despite a wide range of stress relaxation rates, we observe that the flow activation energy of the bulk material is independent of the cross-linker structure. Superposition of storage and loss moduli from frequency sweeps can be performed for different cross-linkers, indicating the same exchange mechanism. We show that we can mix different cross-linkers in a single material in order to further modulate the stress relaxation behavior. Bassil M. El-Zaatari, Jacob S.A. Ishibashi, Julia A. Kalow Article Link

Polymeric metal–organic cages (PolyMOCs) featuring coumarin‐decorated Cu24L24 cuboctahedral metal–organic cages as junctions can be reversibly switched between three redox states in response to light and air. Photoswitchable Sol–Gel Transitions and Catalysis Mediated by Polymer Networks with Coumarin‐Decorated Cu24L24 Metal–Organic Cages as Junctions Nathan J. Oldenhuis, K. Peter Qin, Shu Wang, Hong‐Zhou Ye, Eric A. Alt, Adam P. Willard, Troy Van Voorhis, Stephen L. Craig, and Jeremiah A. Johnson Article Link

MONET trainees Shu Wang and Brian Chen extract DNA from bananas at Go With the Flow, an outreach event with the Society of Rheology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.