News

This Week Sybren Schoustra started as a PhD student in our lab. He will work together with Maarten on his Vidi project, entitled 4D Control over Smart Dynamic Polymers. In his PhD project Sybren will synthesise imine-based dynamic-covalent building blocks, subsequently integrate them into polymer networks, and study how these polymers can lead to mechanically strong, yet still adaptive materials with smart, dynamic properties.

This Week Lucas Teunissen started as a PhD student in our lab. He will work on a NWO-funded CHIPP project (coordinated by m2i), entitled “Nanostructured self-assembled functional materials” (NanoFun), which is part of large network of 4 universities and 6 companies that are involved in this project. In his project he will use controlled polymerisation methods to prepare copolymer brushes onto polymer-coated steel with the aim to obtain  functional/responsive coatings.

Last Friday, November 9, Esther van Andel successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled Romantic Surfaces – Zwitterionic Polymer Brushes for Biomedical Applications. We congratulate her on this superb achievement and wish her all the best in her new position at Leiden University Medical Centre!

Esther’s recent paper in Langmuir is in the Top 20 most downloaded articles for the previous 30 days! The list (and paper) can be found here.

Our 2016 Highlight (review) article by (former) ORC postdoc Fátima García in the Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry on Dynamic Covalent Polymers was one of the journal’s top 20 most downloaded recent papers. Click on the link to read the full paper.

Esther’s recently accepted paper in Langmuir has appeared online. In this contribution, she compared a range of commonly used monomers for antifouling brushes for their antifouling performance, using flow cytometry as the read-out system. The paper can be found here.

Last week Maaike van Slagmaat joined the group for the BSc thesis project with Esther. The coming months she will be synthesising and characterising new macromolecular building blocks for antifouling coatings.

Later this month, Maarten will be presenting work from the group in a lecture entitled “Engineering dynamic self-healing behaviour in metal-stabilised imine polymer networks“, during the 7th EuCheMS Chemistry Conference in Liverpool (UK).

As part of the 100-year anniversary of WUR, Maarten has taken part in the “Creative Innovation: Arts meets Science” initiative. During a kick-off meeting he presented how elements of his work on recyclable plastics can be a source of inspiration for artists: a major, common topic is the interaction and collaboration between species or compounds, and the ability for humans to learn from or alter those.

Interested to find out more about this initiative? Check out our university’s website.

Today Grzegorz Markiewicz joined the group for a 3-month visit. Grzegorz is a PhD student in the group of Artur Stefankiewicz, at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Poland). He will work on a collaborative project focussed on the thermodynamic characterisation of new non-covalent supramolecular polymers based on amino-acid functionalised diimides.