Samuel I. Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor
Department of Materials Science & Engineering
Northwestern University

E-mail: s-stupp@northwestern.edu
Phone: 847-491-3001

BS, University of California, Los Angeles
PhD, Northwestern University

Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Joliot Curie Professor, Paris
Department of Energy Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Materials Chemistry
Humboldt Foundation Senior Award
Fellow, American Physical Society

Research Areas
The Stupp group focuses on materials chemistry, a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field that aims to achieve the molecular design of materials with specific properties and complex functions. Topics studied recently include supra molecular materials, biomaterials for the repair of human tissues in future medicine, nonlinear optical properties of organic solids, self-assembling dendritic molecules that profoundly change the properties of polymers, and templated syntheses of nanostructured semiconductors.

Over the past two years they discovered a set of triblock molecules that self-organize into mushroom-shaped supramolecular units. These nanostructures can have molar masses on the order of 200 kDa and are formed by the aggregation of dozens to hundreds of molecules. Interestingly, these supra molecular units organize into polar layered structures and therefore exhibit many useful properties for technological applications. These include piezoelectric and nonlinear optical properties, as well as the capacity to self-organize into tape-like materials with different chemical structures on opposite surfaces. This last property would enable their use as self-organizing films that, regardless of thickness, present chemical receptors or catalytic sites on one surface only and adhesive properties toward substrates on another surface.

In the field of biomaterials, they are interested in the molecular synthesis of scaffold materials for human repair that present on their surfaces ligands for cell receptors or membranes. These cell-material interactions could promote the regeneration of tissues such as bone, cartilage, blood vessels, nerves, and many others. They also recently developed mineralized structures on biocompatible metals that could serve as substrates for cells to synthesize bone in vivo or in vitro. They are also interested in the design of supra molecular structures containing dendritic molecules for gene therapy and drug delivery.

In the area of templated syntheses, the Stupp research group studies the formation of hybrid materials containing both inorganic and organic components to design complex functions. A recent example is II-VI semiconductors in preorganized organic matrices that serve as templates that create nano scale features to deliver interesting electronic, catalytic, or sensing properties. They discovered the first example of direct templating for large arrays of 2 to 3 nanometer cavities in cadmium and zinc sulfide, a structure that has great potential for solar energy applications or as a chemical sensor.

Related Publications
"Nanostructure Templating in Inorganic Solids with Organic Lyotropic Liquid Crystals" [with P. V. Braun, P. Osenar, V. Tohver, and S. B. Kennedy], J. Amer. Chem. Soc. (in press, 1999).

"Molecular Manipulation of Microstructures: Biomaterials, Ceramics, and Semiconductors" [with P. V. Braun], Science 227:1242 (1997).

"Supramolecular Materials: Self-Organized Nanostructures" [with V. LeBonheur, K. Walker, L. S. Li, K. Huggins, M. Keser, and A. Amstutz], Science 276:384 (1997).

"Three-Dimensional Self-Assembly of Rodcoil Copolymer Nanostruct-ures" [with L. H. Radzilowski and B. O. Carragher], Macromolecules 30 (7):2110 (1997).

"Bulk Synthesis of Two-Dimensional Polymers. The Molecular Recognition Approach" [with S. Son, X. Hong, L. S. Li, H. C. Lin, and M. Keser], J. Am. Chem. Soc. 117 (19):5212 (1995).