(3fi) Nanoscale Engineering and Biomolecular Self-Assembly for Smart Nanomedicine

Nature has evolved numerous highly functional nanomachines to achieve complex and hierarchical assembly in living systems. Many of these fascinating nanomachines are built by highly controlled molecular interactions of protein and nucleic acid components. Inspired by the nature, biomimetic or “bottom‐up” self-assembly has shown a potential to overcome complexity and scalability issues to develop artificial devices between 5 and 100 nm, a challenging size regime for conventional microfabrication approaches. Development of a controlled self-assembly system has the potential to create simpler and diverse next-generation platforms for applications in controlled delivery, vaccine development, biosensing, imaging, and biomaterial templates. Here, I would like to discuss my research interest in the design and engineering of DNA and proteins as building blocks, and the introduction of synthetic biomolecules, such as peptide-oligonucleotide conjugates, for the development of defined nanostructures and one- to three-dimensional assembly. It is anticipated that these approaches incorporating a unique structure‐directing property of nucleic acids to the almost unlimited diversity of amino acid combinations, will introduce new assembly modes for developing stable and biochemically addressable biomedical platforms.

Teaching Interests

I would like the students to feel that the class is giving them more than one solution to a problem. Hence, I will dedicate in making my class interactive and engaging, to help students focus and reflect on the material and ask questions. The students may also vote for different answers, which will in return help me to identify different perspectives and rephrase my explanations. In addition, I would like to discuss my interest in teaching students on natural and synthetic biomolecular systems and how to design and engineer complex systems in the fields of physical chemistry and bio-nanotechnology. Finally, I would like to share my mentoring experiences helping to develop research idea and logical thinking to build an argument toward a biological question, as well as to communicate results for publication and presentation.