Melik C. Demirel, a former ICAM Junior Fellow, has received the Young Investigator Award of the Office of Naval Research for his work on deposition of a novel, nanostructured polymer film. The method developed by Demirel and his group at the Pennsylvania State University does not require lithography or surfactant and works on a variety of surfaces, including glass, silicon, and other polymer surfaces. It is inexpensive and suitable for applications such as marine antifouling coatings, chiral molecular separation, cell attachment and tissue growth, controlled drug release, templated nanolithography and enzyme stabilization.

Figure: A, nanostructured thin film coated on a 12-well plate (white disk).; B, cross-section SEM micrograph of a nanostructured polymer film.

Demirel first heard of ICAM in 2002 when he was a postdoctoral fellow at LANL and met David Pines there. In 2003 he became an ICAM Junior Fellow, using his support for protein-protein interactions project. After Los Alamos, he joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University, which thanks to his efforts became a node of ICAM in 2003. In November of 2005, Demirel was one of the organizers of a cross-disciplinary ICAM Workshop on biologically inspired nanomaterials. This workshop examined the interface between biomolecules and nanomaterials in natural, synthetic, and semisynthetic systems, and focused on nature’s solutions in designing nanomaterials. A summary of the workshop can be found at http://www.esm.psu.edu/~mcd18/bioinspired.pdf.

Demirel’s work is focused on understanding the nanoscale properties of polymeric systems. It was for antifouling work on nanostructured polymers that he received the Young Investigator award. He and his group, working with nanostructured films of poly-p-xylylene (PPX), in which there were free-standing, slanted, parallel columns containing nanowires. The nanostructure enhances the surface area, making these films useful in a number of applications. Moreover, their architecture can be controlled to increase bioadhesion, for cell studies, or decrease it for antifouling. Novel chemical properties can be obtained by co-deposition of two or more types of PPX monomers with different side groups, such as ester, ketone, amine, lactose, etc. For references to their publications, see http://www.personal.psu.edu/mcd18/biomol.html.

By Karie Friedman, ICAMNews – July 2007