Dr. Amy Blum

Our group focuses on creating novel nanostructured devices and materials through self assembly. We take advantage of the unique properties of nanoscale and nanostructured materials by inventing new techniques for assembly and construction. Creating such materials will likely result in the emergence of previously unseen physical and chemical properties. Understanding and exploiting these properties will enable new and cheaper approaches to designed materials for many purposes such as photonics, electronics, and sensing applications.

We use biomolecules such as DNA, proteins, and intact virus particles as scaffolds to take advantage of the specificity and versatility they provide. These biotemplates give us access to a size scale that is difficult or impossible to reach using other techniques, particularly for assembly in three dimensions.

Core Research Areas

• Design of biotemplates and nanostructured materials using models, existing crystallographic data, and chemical intuition.
• Characterization of candidate molecular or nanoparticle components and of the assembled nanostructures using scanning probe and spectroscopic techniques.
• Self-assembly strategies on multiple size scales.