Nanocellulose as Nanoscale Building Blocks for Nano/Bio-Hybrid Soft Materials in Bio/Nano Medicine
Jin-Woo Kim, Senior Member, IEEE and Gurshagan Kandhola
Bio/Nano Technology Group, Institute for Nanoscience & Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA; Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA
jwkim@uark.edu
Abstract
Various soft nanoscale materials have proven effective as functional materials, offering immense promise to advance diverse fields, ranging from optoelectronics and nanophotonics to molecular/nano sensing, biosecurity, and bio/nano medicine. Great interest has been focused on their promising attributes for manipulating into multifunctional hybrid nanostructured materials with tailored size, shape and functionality. Despite recent progress, there still is plenty of room for improvement and many untapped resources for innovative strategies to be developed. This presentation will focus on recent advances in our group to design, fabricate, and characterize such biohybrid nanocomposites with nanocelluloses as building blocks, i.e.,cellulose nanocrystals and cellulose nanofibrils, derived from cellulose, the most abundant biopolymer on Earth. It will discuss our current results as well as future directions of the controlled assembly of nanocellulose-based composites to realize highly functional and tunable bio-hybrid systems in desired patterns and geometries, and drive innovations in novel hybrid fused technologies in bio/nano medicine.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (OIA-1457888) and the National Institute of Health (1R21HG010055).
Short Bio
Jin-Woo Kim is a Director of Bio/Nano Technology Group and a Professor of Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Nanoscience & Engineering at University of Arkansas. He is an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH). He received his first B.S. in Chemical Technology (currently Chemical & Biological Engineering) from Seoul National University, the second B.S. in Microbiology from University of Iowa, the M.S. in Biology from University of Wisconsin, and the Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from Texas A&M University. He was a Visiting Professor of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His research focus is in the area of Bio/Nano Technology, i.e., biologically inspired nanotechnology, which spans interdisciplinary fields of biological engineering, biomedical engineering, biology, chemistry, and nanotechnology. Learning from biological systems in nature, his research aims to develop more effective and efficient routes to “panoscale” (i.e., ‘any’ scale) system integration of multifunctional hierarchical structures for biomimetic advanced materials and devices. He has generated over 130 peer-reviewed publications, over 230 presentations with over 85 invited presentations, and 5 patents granted or pending. He received several teaching and research awards, holds guest editorships and journal editorial board memberships for several journals, including co-Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Open Journal of Nanotechnology, and has been ad-hoc reviewers for leading journals, including Science, PNAS, and Nature Nanotechnology. He held leadership positions for international societies, including Vice President for Conferences (2021-2022) and Vice President for Publications (2017-2019) of IEEE Nanotechnology Council, is a steering committee chair of IEEE-NANOMED, and has served as organizing committees for several international conferences, including general chairs (2015 and 2019), general co-chairs (2011 and 2017) and program chair (2010) of IEEE-NANOMED, general chair (2023) and general co-chair (2019) of IEEE-NANO, general chair (2020) of IEEE-NEMS, etc. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical & Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and IEEE Nanotechnology Distinguished Lecturer (2017-2018).