Title: "Self-assembled Surfaces as a Means to Controlling Biological Binding."

Abstract
Polymer brushes are a common feature in many biological surfaces. The ability to rapidly transform a substrate from a hard, structural material to a soft, hydrogel structure over the distance of a few tens of nanometers makes polymer brushes elegant materials for tailoring the biology-materials interface. Polymer brushes, because of their surface confinement, are typically stretched from the surface when compared to identical unattached polymer segments and confinement provides them with useful barrier properties. This presentation will discuss recent studies of surface grown polymer brushes, effects of charge on surface properties and brush viability, the use of charged brushes for interaction with biological systems both in terms of directing cell growth and their use for support of cell membrane mimics.

Biofouling is a major problem affecting marine operations and aquatic industries, leading to increased fuel and maintenance costs. While “grown from” polymer brushes cannot address large surface area applications, the use of block copolymers in place of “grown from” brushes provides most of the benefits of polymer brushes with the ability to coat large area surfaces. We describe the incorporation of stable radicals as a component in an amphiphilic block copolymer system containing polydimethylsiloxane and polyethylene glycol. The antifouling and fouling release performance of these materials was investigated through collaborative study of settlement, attachment, and removal of fouling organisms and correlated to surface structure and chemistry.

Bio
Christopher Kemper Ober is the Francis Bard Professor of Materials Engineering at Cornell University. He received his BSc (Honours Chemistry) from the University of Waterloo, Canada and his PhD in Polymer Science & Engineering at UMass Amherst. After several years at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada working in marking technology, Ober arrived at Cornell University in 1986. His research is focused on lithography, patterning, the biology materials interface, and control of surface structure in thin films. Ober was honored in 2015 with the Photopolymer Science & Technology Outstanding Contribution Award and made a SPIE Senior Member (2018). He is currently the Director of the Cornell Nanoscale Facility. He is also an elected member of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

He is the 2006 winner of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Applied Polymer Science and received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2007. In 2009, Ober was named a Fellow of the ACS and was awarded the Gutenberg Research Prize by the University of Mainz. In 2014 he was a JSPS Fellow in Japan. More recently he was named a fellow of the APS (2014) and the AAAS (2015).