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Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

 
Professor Kotov smiling with students

Professor Kotov meets students after the lecture, courtesy @ChemistryPhotography

This year’s prestigious Melville Lectures were given by Professor Nicholas Kotov, an international leader in inorganic nanoparticle research.

Professor Nicholas A. Kotov

Professor Kotov is an expert in the area of self-assembly of inorganic nanoparticles, complex functional nanostructures, biomimetic nanocomposites and chiral nanomaterials. He is the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan.

In his research, Kotov has investigated inorganic nanostructures demonstrating that, similarly to many proteins and other biomolecules, their propensity to self-assemble originates from inter-particle interactions at the nanoscale, where chirality also plays a prominent role.

The in-depth understanding of these interactions at a molecular level led to the development of a range of fascinating nano-constructs for applications spanning from energy conversion and storage, catalysis to optoelectronics and drug delivery.

The Melville Lectures Series is comprised of two lectures by a leader in colloidal chemistry, nanomaterials and self-assembly. Kotov’s first lecture, “Chirality-Complexity Relations for Nanostructures,” focused on the hierarchically organised micro- and macrostructures of chiral nanostructures. In the lecture, Kotov also analysed the design of chiral nanoparticles with hierarchical asymmetry and self-assembled particle systems for enantioselective catalysis, immune modulation and machine vision.

In his second lecture, entitled “Topometric Design of Self-Assembled Biomimetic Composites,” Kotov showed that it is possible to use graph theory to transition from the inexact approaches of replicative “good-luck-based” engineering of biomimetic nanocomposites to their exact structural design, and explained how the same methodology can be applied to other nanomaterials.

The lectures were introduced by Oren A. Scherman, who is Professor of Supramolecular and Polymer Chemistry and Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis. Scherman’s research interests include the synthesis of functional nanosystems, controlled polymer architectures and dynamic supramolecular assemblies through molecular recognition processes.

Professor Oren A. Scherman introduces Professor Kotov

The Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis is based in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and provides the leading role in innovative polymer synthesis in the University of Cambridge.

Presenting his work