CBE Seminar: Bioinspired Electronic Materials

Abstract: Billions of years of natural evolution has resulted in an enormous number of proteins that are involved virtually in any biological process. Mimicking the unique features of these effective natural machineries, can be extremely productive for advancing today's technologies. Motivated by this approach, our group utilizes de-novo designed peptides that capture protein features and optimizes them for electronic applications. This approach will be demonstrated in this talk in the development of electron and proton conducting materials, and sophisticated surface functionalization layers. These examples demonstrate that de-novo designed peptides can be powerful building blocks for the preparation of novel, high performance, biocompatible and environmentally friendly organic and hybrid bioelectronic materials.

Bio: Nurit Ashkenasy received her bachelor's degree in physics and in materials engineering from the Technion, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Tel-Aviv University (2000). She then moved to the U.S. as a Fulbright Fellow to pursue postdoctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute. She is a faculty member in the Department of Materials Engineering and a member of the Ilse Katz Institute of Nanotechnology at Ben-Gurion University since 2006. Ashkenasy has authored and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed papers published in highly rated academic journals.

Host: Associate Professor Alon Gorodetsky