Theoretical Profits: Theory in the Polymer Industry
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Lecture 4:30 p.m.
Pancoe Auditorium, Room 1101
Arthur and Gladys Pancoe Life Sciences Pavilion
2200 Campus Drive, Evanston, Illinois
Reception to follow in the Einstein Bros. Bagels meeting area

Field-Based Simulations for the Design of Polymer
Nanostructures
Friday, October 24, 2008
Lecture 11 a.m.
Pancoe Auditorium, Room 1101
Arthur and Gladys Pancoe Life Sciences Pavilion
2200 Campus Drive, Evanston, Illinois

Theoretical Profits: Theory in the Polymer Industry

From its inception the polymer industry has engaged theorists in materials design. However, the commoditization of the industry and the widespread dissolution of centralized corporate research laboratories have proved especially challenging for the careers of theoretically and computationally oriented polymer scientists. Their expertise will be needed to address the intellectual and technical challenges abundant in rapidly developing business areas that relate to applications of polymers to energy, the environment, and health.  The necessary theoretical input will increasingly come from collaborations with academia. This lecture reflects on Fredrickson’s experiences as a research collaborator and consultant to the polymer industry and provides examples of how theoretical input can lead to new paradigms for the design of advanced polymeric materials.

Field-Based Simulations for the Design of Polymer

Plastic materials and solution-borne polymer formulations prove challenging to design because they often contain many components and can exhibit selfassembly and phase behavior of daunting complexity. This lecture describes a suite of new modeling tools that are well suited to this class of soft material design problems. Rather than applying conventional computer simulation techniques to “particle-based” models of polymeric fluids, Fredrickson and his colleagues have developed “field-theoretic computer simulation” schemes for numerically sampling functional integrals comprising statistical field-theory models of complex fluid systems. Such simulation methods are particularly favorable for dense polymer systems of high molecular weight. This lecture discusses applications to problems related to the design of nanostructured block copolymers and polymer alloys, supramolecular polymers, and polyelectrolyte formulations.