Harnessing the Power of Natural Products Towards the Synthesis of High Performance Materials

Society is highly dependent upon plastics to add value to everyday life, however, the end-of-life products are highly problematic, especially when they enter into our waterways, crowd our waste streams, and produce nanoplastics that get into the environment. Sustainable polymers have the potential to overcome many of these challenges. Particularly, polymers derived from sugars or polyphenolic compounds that contain degradable moieties in the backbone are of great promise. Through the synthetic manipulations of these natural products, we aim to produce and characterize high performance materials.