Events

Abstract

DNA is one of the essential molecules in life as it carries genetic information. The ability to process the information may also be leveraged for translating DNA into an engineering material. This talk will show how molecular information can be harnessed and programmed into nanoscale structures and machinery. I will first introduce the field of structural DNA nanotechnology and discuss how DNA molecules can be used to construct designer nanomaterials and program their properties and behaviors. A free-energy-guided design process will be discussed along with mechanisms for dynamic reconfiguration. I will showcase several architected metastructures and highlight their unique characteristics. The examples include geometric frustration and Jitterbug transformation. These DNA materials are explored as synthetic biomaterials. The presentation will be concluded with several exemplary applications.

About the Speaker

Jong Hyun Choi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Yonsei University, and earned his doctoral degree, also in Mechanical Engineering, from the University of California at Berkeley. He completed postdoctoral research in Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois and MIT before joining Purdue in 2009. He is an ASME fellow and received several prestigious awards including an NSF Career Award and a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research focuses on understanding physics and chemistry of DNA-based materials and devices for various engineering applications.