2024 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit
Symposium X—MRS/The Kavli Foundation Frontiers of Materials
Wednesday, December 4
12:15 pm – 1:15 pm
Sheraton, 2nd Floor, Grand Ballroom
Juan J. de Pablo
The University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory
AI-Enabled Design of Sustainable Polymeric Materials
Abstract
There is considerable interest in designing new sustainable polymeric materials whose performance is comparable to that of commercially available polyolefin-based plastics. There is also interest in developing new processes capable of degrading polyolefins, leading to products that can be used in new materials and applications. In this presentation I will describe a new, comprehensive computational platform that relies on multiscale models to predict the properties of realistic polymer blends, including their degradation when exposed to different environments, and that can be used for reliable design of new materials. At atomic and molecular length scales, the proposed models are based on many-body machine-learned force fields. At long time and length scales, the models rely on hierarchically coarse-grained representations that are capable of describing the linear and nonlinear rheology of highly entangled systems. The capabilities of the proposed approaches will be discussed in the context of several industrially relevant examples.
Biography
Juan de Pablo is the Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and Executive Dean of New York University's (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering. He is also a professor of engineering at NYU. Prior to these roles, he served as the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and Executive Vice President for Science, Innovation, National Laboratories, and Global Initiatives at The University of Chicago; and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
De Pablo’s research is focused on the development of advanced models and computational techniques, including data-science-based approaches, for molecular design. His current interests encompass polymeric materials, functional biopolymers such as DNA, RNA, and chromatin, liquid crystals, colloidal suspensions, glasses and metamaterials.
De Pablo earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and a PhD degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted postdoctoral research at ETH Zürich. He is the author of over 700 publications and 25 patents. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is also a foreign correspondent member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.