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PROFESSOR JENNIFER N. CHA
The PhysOrg article
Nanoscience goes 'big': Discovery could lead to enhanced
electronics said
Nanoscience has the potential to play an enormous role in enhancing a
range of products, including sensors, photovoltaics, and consumer
electronics. Scientists in this field have created a multitude of nano
scale materials, such as metal nanocrystals, carbon nanotubes, and
semiconducting nanowires. However, despite their appeal, it has remained
an astounding challenge to engineer the orientation and placement of
these materials into the desired device architectures that are
reproducible in high yields and at low costs — until
now.
Jen Cha, a UC San Diego nanoengineering professor, and her team of
researchers, have discovered that one way to bridge this gap is to use
biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins. Details of this discovery were
recently published in a paper titled "Large Area Spatially Ordered
Arrays of Gold Nanoparticles Directed by Lithographically Confined DNA
Origami," in Nature Nanotechnology.
Jennifer N. Cha, Ph.D. is
Professor of NanoEngineering, UC San Diego.
Jen's research is focused on using
biological and
chemical approaches to assemble nanoscale materials, such as metal and
semiconductor nanoparticles, nanorods, nanowires, and single walled
carbon nanotubes. Due to their unique electronic, optical, and
mechanical properties, nanoscale materials have been heavily explored
for applications that range from medicine to electronics to energy.
However, their sub-20nm dimensions have led to difficulties in directing
their placement, orientation, or assembly into functional architectures.
For example, a bottom-up approach that can direct the placement of
nanoscale materials on lithographically defined surfaces is key to many
electronics applications. For medical imaging and therapy, it is
important to engineer ways to fabricate 3-dimensional biocompatible
nanoscale assemblies, such as micelles or liposomes that can also
release payloads.
Fundamental research in her laboratory is focused on the design and use
of chemistry and engineering to synthesize and create well-defined
organic-inorganic systems from nanoscale material building blocks.
Because biological molecules, such as peptides, DNA, and proteins,
provide significant capabilities for the assembly of nanoscale
materials, a significant portion of the research centers around
interfacing biological systems with nanoscale objects and using
biomolecular interactions to drive the assembly. Specific applications
include engineering nanoparticle-peptide systems for in vitro and in
vivo detection, synthesizing inorganic-polypeptide systems into 2- and
3-dimensional arrays, and using DNA based bottom-up approaches to build
parallel arrays of nanoelectronic devices.
Jen coauthored
Silicatein
filaments and subunits from a marine sponge direct the
polymerization of silica and silicones in vitro,
Biomimetic synthesis of ordered silica structures mediated by block
copolypeptides,
Assembly of Nanoparticles into Hollow Spheres Using Block
Copolypeptides,
Efficient Catalysis of Polysiloxane Synthesis by Silicatein Α
Requires
Specific Hydroxy and Imidazole Functionalities,
Spontaneous formation of Nanoparticle vesicles from homopolymer
polyelectrolytes, and
Oriented Mesoporous Organosilicate Thin Films.
Jen earned her B.A. in Cell Biology at UC Berkeley in 1994 and her Ph.D.
in
Chemistry at UC Santa Barbara in 2001.
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