Seminar Speaker: David Kisailus, UC Irvine

From Nature to Engineering: Biological Blueprints for Next Generation Advanced Materials

Abstract

Over hundreds of millions of years, organisms have derived specific sets of traits in response to common selection pressures that serve as guideposts for optimal biological designs. A prime example is the evolution of toughened structures in disparate lineages within plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. Extremely tough structures can function much like armor, battering rams, or reinforcements that enhance the ability of organisms to win competitions, find mates, acquire food, escape predation, and withstand high winds or turbulent flow. From an engineering perspective, biological solutions are intriguing because they must work in a multifunctional context. An organism can rarely be optimally designed for only one function or one environmental condition. Some of these natural systems have developed well-orchestrated strategies, exemplified in the biological tissues of numerous animal and plant species, to synthesize and construct materials from a limited selection of available starting materials. The resulting structures display multiscale architectures with incredible fidelity and often exhibit properties that are similar, and frequently superior to, mechanical properties exhibited by many engineering materials. In specific instances, comparative analyses of multiscale structures have pinpointed which design principles have arisen convergently; when more than one evolutionary path arrives at the same solution, we have a good indication that it is the best solution. This is required for survival under extreme conditions. In this work, we describe a few of these systems that show convergent design and describe how controlled syntheses and hierarchical assembly using organic scaffolds lead to these integrated macroscale structures. We describe their function and its translation to biomimetic materials used for engineering applications.

Biography

David Kisailus is the Henry Samueli Faculty Excellence Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Kisailus, a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and Member of the UNESCO Chair in Materials and Technologies for Energy Conversion, Saving and Storage (MATECSS), received his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara (2002), M.S. from the University of Florida in Materials Science and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University. After his Ph.D., Prof. Kisailus was appointed a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, University of California at Santa Barbara. Following this, he was a Research Scientist at HRL Laboratories and then joined as faculty at the University of California. Professor Kisailus is currently the PI of the Biomimetics and Nanostructured Materials Group and the Director of a Multi-University Research Initiative on Microbe-Materials Interactions for Lunar Environments with Pacific Northwest National Laboratories as well as Johns Hopkins and Northwestern Universities. His group’s research focuses on investigating biomineralization processes and the resulting structure-property relationships in biological materials, as well as their translation to biomimetics. He also is developing solution-based processes to synthesize nanoscale materials with controlled crystal size, shape, and phase for energy and environmental-based applications. Professor Kisailus has published over 150 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, ACS Nano, Advanced Functional Materials, PNAS and JACS. He has also been granted 16 patents (with more than 20 pending). His research is highlighted in high-profile media including Nature, NY Times, LA Times, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and BBC.