News

Esther’s paper on the design, synthesis and characterisation of fully zwitterionic functionalised dendrimers has been published in ACS Omega. In this paper Esther reports a new route towards fully zwitterionic PPI dendrimers that are also equipped with a number of click handles for further functionalisation. During the synthesis and characterisation of the dendrimers, she also developed the use of XPS for detailed characterisation of the newly synthesised dendrimers. The full paper can be read here.

During the NWO Chains 2018 conference student team Beads vs Beats won the Holland Chemistry Student Competition 2018 (previously known as the Top Sector Chemistry Student Competition), for a proposal entitled: “Metafoams: a new and effective material for sound isolation”. The team consists of students Sophie van Lange (WUR) and Roel Borgers (TUE).

Congrats to Sophie and Roel!

This week, Maarten’s review with Imogen Riddell (University of Manchester) on Self‐Assembly of Functional Discrete Three‐Dimensional Architectures in Water appeared online in Angewandte Chemie. Please read the article if you want to know more about the developments in the construction of aqueous assemblies from both synthetic and bio-derived components.

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.