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Building from Nature to Develop Advanced Materials

Date and Time
Photo of Javier Read de Alaniz
Photo of Javier Read de Alaniz

ONLINE CBE SEMINAR

All Fall 2020 CBE Seminars will be hosted online via Zoom. RSVP to receive zoom link by emailing info@bioengineering.ucsb.edu.

Zoom will open after the host has joined at the start of each seminar. You can ask questions through the chat forum and by raising your "hand" and the speaker will call on you. 

Speaker

Javier Read De Alaniz, Ph.D. 
Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Associate Director of the California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI)
Director of NSF BioPACIFIC MIP Center
University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract

The BioPACIFIC MIP (BioPolymers, Automated Cellular Infrastructure, Flow, and Integrated Chemistry: Materials Innovation Platform), located at the University of California's (UC) Santa Barbara and Los Angeles campuses, is a research platform dedicated to exploiting yeast, fungi, and bacteria as biological factories to generate building blocks in order to make polymeric materials (plastics) with superior properties to existing materials. Robotic automation is used to quickly prepare the bio-derived polymer materials, these materials are incorporated into higher order structures using advanced 3D printers, and cutting-edge characterization tools are used to determine how structure and organization at the atomic and molecular level affect materials properties. Dedicated and broadly accessible databases record properties and processing information from these tools, which are integrated with computer modeling and machine learning to help close the design loop and optimize these plastics derived from living organisms, in alignment with the methodology of the Materials Genome Initiative. In this seminar, I will discuss the scientific ecosystem of the BioPACIFIC MIP with researchers coming from materials science, biology, chemistry, and engineering, as well as our groups effort to design and develop new class of light-responsive materials and bioconjugation.

BIO

Prof. Javier Read de Alaniz received his B.S. degree from Fort Lewis College in 1999 where he conducted undergraduate research under the direction of Professor William R. Bartlett. He obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Tomislav Rovis at Colorado State University in 2006 with a research focus on asymmetric catalysis. Javier then moved to California, where he worked in the area of total synthesis with Professor Larry E. Overman at the University of California, Irvine. He began his independent career in 2009 and is currently a Professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSB, an Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and Director of NSF BioPACIFIC MIP Center.