Flexible electronics and function-integrated synthetic skins or coatings require ultrathin flexible films, able to dynamically conform to complex shapes while reconfiguring internal constituents to alter their properties and connectivity. We consider phospholipid lamellae as a model for a class of such 2D composites and complex fluids. With thicknesses of only 4 nm, and integrating 2D solid particles that are plate-shaped in their simplest manifestation but which can be striped, faceted, or more complex, two phase lamella exhibit a breadth of complex behaviors reminiscent of classical complex fluids, but with counterintuitive dictated by the bending elasticity of the 2D lamellar fluid and crystalline 2D colloids. This talk explores two separate ways in which elasticity from both the fluid and solid produces physically beautiful, sometimes counterintuitive application-relevant results: Crystallization to form ultrathin (4 nm) solids by nucleation and growth, with control of shape through membrane bending and tension, and assembly of compact 2D colloids within the 2D membrane fluid into touch-sensitive arrays and networks.
Maria Santore is a Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering, with a secondary appointment Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Research in the Santore group aims, through its focus on soft material interfaces, to discover new interfacial behaviors and mechanisms and to translate new quantitative understanding to tangible scientific and technological advances. Projects focus on soft materials in which relatively weak interactions allow reconfigurations in response to moderate forces, or in which interesting molecular behaviors produce new properties.
Santore was trained formally as a Chemical Engineer, obtaining her B.S. at Carnegie Mellon and Ph.D. from Princeton, the latter under support from an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Santore’s postdoctoral studies of polymer glasses and blends in the Polymer Division at NIST were supported by an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and extended her interests to far from equilibrium systems.
Maria Santore joined the Chemical Engineering Department at Lehigh University as the Dana Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor in subsequent years. There she built one of the first total internal reflection fluorescence instruments for the study of interfacial dynamics in materials, in the days before digital cameras. Her extension of this methodology to protein denaturing kinetics and its influence on bioadhesion was one of her early influential works. She was awarded the Alfred Nobel Robinson Award for outstanding research in 1996 and was named the Class of 1961 Chaired Associate Professor while at Lehigh. Following a sabbatical at the Institute for Medicine and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania she joined the University of Massachusetts Department of Polymer Science and Engineering as a Full Professor with a secondary appointment in Chemical Engineering.
For 13 years, Santore served as a senior editor of Langmuir, the ACS (American Chemical Society) Journal of Surfaces and Colloids, and for almost as long, as a section editor for the Elsevier Journal Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science.
Santore is a Fellow in the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. She was awarded the 2015 Hopper Lectureship in Engineering by the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018 she was the UMass Distinguished faculty lecturer and was awarded the UMass Chancellor’s Medal.