BME Seminar Series
Presents

Angela Belcher, Ph.D.

Germeshuasen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Professor of Biological Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

From nature and back again...Giving new life to materials for energy, electronics, medicine and the environment

Friday, January 23th
2:00 - 3:00 p.m.
BME Lecture Hall (Room 1041), MR5

Refreshments at 1:45 p.m.

Hosted by Kimberly Kelly, Ph.D.

Dr. Belcher attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received her Bachelor's degree from the College of Creative Studies in 1991 and her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1997. She is director of the Biomolecular Materials Group at MIT and a MacArthur Fellow, following the MacArthur Foundation awarding her their genius grant for 2004. A TIME article featured her work on viral batteries and Scientific American named her research leader of the year in 2006 for her current project.

After studying abalone shells, she worked with several colleagues at MIT and managed to engineer a virus, known as the M13 bacteriophage whose target is usually “Escherichea coli”. M13 can be made to latch onto and coat itself with inorganic materials including gold and cobalt oxide. The long tublar virus (coated in cobalt oxide) now acts as a minuscule length of wire called a nanowire. Dr. Belcher and her colleagues coaxed many of these nanowires together and found that they resemble the basic components of a potentially very powerful and compact battery.

ABSTRACT

Organisms have been making exquisite inorganic materials for over 500 million years.  Although these materials have many desired physical properties such as strength, regularity, and environmental benign processing, the types of materials that organisms have evolved to work with are limited. However, there are many properties of living systems that could be potentially harnessed by researchers to make advanced technologies that are smarter, more adaptable, and that are synthesized to be compatible with the environment. One approach to designing future technologies which have some of the properties that living organisms use so well, is to evolve organisms to work with a more diverse set of building blocks.  These materials could be designed to address many scientific and technological problems in electronics, military, medicine, and energy applications. Examples include a virus enabled lithium ion rechargeable battery we recently built that has many improved properties over conventional batteries, as well as materials for solar and display technologies. This talk will address conditions under which organisms first evolved to make materials and scientific approaches to move beyond naturally evolved materials to genetically imprint advanced technologies.