| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Victoria Albright victoria.albright@tamu.edu Materials Science & Engineering |
| Faculty Mentor: | Dr. Svetlana Sukhishvili Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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TBD |
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Team Size:
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4 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Hard working students will be rewarded with opportunities to present their work at a conference, earn co-authorship on publications or even become a full member of our research group. |
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Team Needs:
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Science & engineering majors will be given preference. |
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Description:
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The future of polymeric materials as biological implant coatings to prevent bacterial infection and stimulate cell growth depends on the ability to selectively trigger the release of components from the materials on demand. Our research group currently explores manipulating chemistry of polymer particles and films in order to develop polymeric materials that can deliver antibiotics in a controlled fashion. This work will explore direct assembly of antimicrobial agents and enzymes into layer-by-layer coatings with biodegradable polymers. Students are needed to help choose better drugs to incorporate into the films, understand the optimal conditions to deposit stable films, explore enzymatic degradation of films as well as film stability in various pH and salt conditions. Students will become familiar with the layer-by-layer assembly, ellipsometry, and various other techniques. Check out our recent work on biomedical polymer coatings that was featured in Science here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn500674g as well as our most recent work: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1742706117305020.
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