Many congrats to our MDI graduate students, Arielle Mann (Weck group) and Yongfan Yang (Kahr group) for being awarded the Kramer and Sokol Fellowships, respectively.

Many congrats to Dr. Veronica Grebe of the Weck group for her successful thesis defense, titled “Custom Geometry-Based Algorithms for the Classification and Quantification of Order in Anisotropic Particle Assemblies”. Well done Veronica!

Check out the new publication from Fangbei Liu in the Weck group titled “Photoresponsive Azobenzene-Functionalized Shell Cross-Linked Micelles for Selective Asymmetric Transfer Hydrogenation”.

Congrats to 2022 PMSE Fellow, Marcus Weck, “for pioneering and innovative contributions that interface supramolecular and polymer chemistry to access new applied polymeric and colloidal materials.”

MDI Investigators discover seven new crystal polymorphs of imidacloprid, the world’s leading insecticide,, adding to two known forms. Anticipating that insect uptake of imidacloprid molecules would depend on the respective free energies of crystal polymorph surfaces, measurements of insect knockdown times for the metastable crystal forms were as much as nine times faster acting than the commercial form against Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex mosquitoes as well as Drosophila (fruit flies). Their results suggest that replacement of commercially available imidacloprid crystals (a.k.a. Form I) in space-spraying with any one of three new polymorphs, Forms IV, VI, IX, would suppress vector-borne disease transmission while reducing environmental exposure and harm to nontarget organisms. Find the article here.

Congrats to Anna Yusov and Allie Dillon for their perspective review article “Hydrogen bonded frameworks: smart materials used smartly” that appeared in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Molecular Systems Design & Engineering! The article was featured on the front cover of the journal. Find the article here

Graduate student Noalle Fellah and Alex Shtukenberg, joined by undergraduates Carolyn Zhang and Catherine Chen, Tony Hu and Bart Kahr reported the puzzling crystallization behaviors of nicotinamide and isonicotinamide, each forming eight polymorphs but differing in the number of polymorphs from solution or melt crystallization. Read the article here.

The MDI would like to extend its heartiest congratulations to Eman Ahmed (Weck group), who was awarded one of three Sokol fellowships, and Veronica Grebe (Weck) and Anna Yusov (Ward/Kahr), who were awarded two of four Kramer fellowships this year. Well done!

Graduate students Xiaodi Zhong, Hengyu Zhou, and coworkers reported in Chemical Communications the Eshelby twisting and untwisting of benzil nanocrystal in silico. The simulations revealed that nanrods with negative Burgers vectors increased the already present right-handed twisting, whereas dislocations with positive Burgers vectors drove the twisted structure back towards a straight configuration. The article can be found here.

Graduate student Eman Ahmed and post-doctoral student Tyler Womble collaborated with the Jang group at Georgia Tech to investigate the self-assembly behavior of triblock terpolymers into multicompartment micelles. Linear triblock terpolymers containing hydrophilic, lipophilic and fluorophilic domains were synthesized using ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP). Our scaffold design offers an efficient approach for the synthesis of the target materials with fast polymerization kinetics, complete block incorporation and control over block sequence. Micelles with “Core–shell–corona”, “disk-like”, “raspberry-like” and “worm-like” morphologies were observed by cryogenic transmission electron microscopy and dissipative particle dynamics simulations. This work is the first report of the assembly of multicompartment micelles by linear triblock terpolymers synthesized using ROMP. Check it out here.

Graduate students Noalle Fellah and Keke Zhang (Tianjin University), in collaboration with Dr. Vilmalí López-Mejías (University of Puerto Rico), report the polymorphic behavior of flufenamic acid under nanoscale confinement. Whereas previous reports have demonstrated that nanoconfinement can alter (thermodynamic) polymorph stability rankings, these results illustrate that nanoscale confinement can arrest and alter phase transformations kinetics such that otherwise hidden pathways can be observed. Find the article here.

Investigators from the NYU Molecular Design Institute and the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a new crystal polymorph of deltamethrin, a widely-used contact insecticide used for malaria prevention,, which is more than 10 times as effective against mosquitoes compared with the currently used version. The team included Jingxiang Yang, Bryan Erriah, Chunhua T. Hu, Ethan Reiter, Xiaolong Zhu, Mike Ward and Bart Kahr from NYU, and Vilmalí López-Mejías and Isis Paola Carmona-Sepúlveda from the UPR. Find the article here.

Molecular Design Institute graduate students Fangyuan Dong, Mingzhu Liu and Veronica Grebe reported in Chemistry of Materials nineteen uniquely shaped anisotropic colloids that form ordered crystals under dielectrophoretic fields. The various particle shapes resulted in crystalline phases with p6m, cmm or p2 plane group symmetries, two plastic phases, and a disordered phase. The observations establish a relationship between particle shape and the resulting 2D structures, providing guidance for the design of 2D colloidal crystals. Link to the article here.

Congratulations to our Artist in Residence, Maria C. Ferriera for winning the GLAS Animation grant for her animated film project titled In the Garden.

Undergraduate Sishuang Tang, graduate students Anna Yusov, Yuantao Li and Melissa Tan, visiting student Yunhui Hao, and Tony Hu teamed up to demonstrate that ROY, a compound known to form ten polymorphs with red, orange or yellow colors as a consequence of conformational flexibility, can be included in various guanidinium organosulfonate hydrogen-bonded frameworks that limit its conformational twisting out of plane. The publication was included in a special issue dedicated to Nobel Laureate Jean-Marie Lehn on the event of his 80th birthday. Link to the article here.

Postdoc Marcel Handke, graduate students Yang Wu and Yuantao Li, and Tony Hu discovered that the ubiquitous luminophore [Ru(bpy)3]2+ can be sequestered as a guest in an unusual guanidinium organosulfonate host framework architecture that guides the [Ru(bpy)3]2+ into 1D zigzag chains that suggest unique through-space energy transfer characteristics.

Undergraduate members of the MDI have celebrated their graduation from NYU! Congrats to Mengdi Qiu, Sishuang Tang, Christie Passos (Ward group), Brandon Kim (Weck group) and Matt Weigl (Sacanna group).