Dr. Melik Demirel: "Nanostructured Polymers for Biomedical Applications"

Dr. Melik Demirel
College of Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh

"Nanostructured Polymers for Biomedical Applications"

The growth of spatially organized structures is of considerable fundamental interest, since it may provide us with important clues to the way in which organized structures form in nature. A closer look at complex structures in insect wings and lizard toes reveal organized structured features at the microscopic scale. Synthetic polymers, that mimic biological materials in their designs, form organized structures too. We have demonstrated, for the first time, that nanostructured polymer coatings can be fabricated using gas-phase methods by an oblique angle polymerization (OAP). These structures are composed of approximately 40,000,000 aligned columns (approximately 100-150 nm in diameter) per square millimeter similar to the gecko footpad or insect wing. The production technique is a bottom-up approach and does not require any template and lithography method. In this presentation, we will describe our process for creating nanostructured polymer surfaces and present results in the area of hand-held biosensors, and biomedical coatings.