2011 Participants
Esther Brewis
Thermoresponsive polymers are a class of materials which possesses the ability to reversibly undergo a phase transition from hydrophilic to hydrophobic when they pass through a certain temperature, a property has made these polymers a topic of intense interest in fields such as drug delivery. The temperature at which polymers undergo this phase transition has been thought to depend upon their hydrophilic-hydrophobic balance of the polymer i.e. the more hydrophobic a polymer, the lower its LCST, and the more hydrophilic a polymer, the the higher its LCST. The DAF group recently reported intriguing new thermoresponsive polymers which appear to break this rule, and this project intends to investigate the reasons for these unusual observations.
Funding Source: Nuffield Foundation