Chemistry and WIN Joint Seminar: Zachary Hudson

Zachary Hudson
Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Chemistry
University of British Columbia

Friday, November 22, 2019
10:30 a.m.
QNC-1501

Abstract: 

Techniques for the assembly of hierarchical nanostructures from soft matter have opened the door to many new applications of nanotechnology. Despite these achievements, nanoscale syntheses which rely on self-assembly can be highly dependent on conditions such as solvent and temperature if the integrity of the nanomaterial is to be maintained. Bottlebrush copolymers provide a compelling bottom-up approach to the synthesis of hierarchical nanostructures from soft material, allowing for the preparation of multicompartment structures that remain nanosegregated by virtue of their covalent chemistry. Here we describe methods for the preparation of fiber-like nanomaterials that mimic the multilayer structure of organic electronic devices on individual polymer chains. Narrowly dispersed fibers are prepared from materials commonly used as the hole transport, electron transport, and host materials in organic electronics, with molecular weights on the order of 10⁶ Da. Finally, we use this approach to prepare nanofibers with the structure of multilayer organic devices on single macromolecules, and to reveal new photophysical properties enabled by this unique morphology.

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Zachary M. Hudson is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. Zac was born in Ottawa in 1986, and completed his B.Sc. at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He remained at Queen’s to pursue a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Suning Wang, focusing on the development of luminescent materials for organic electronics. During his Ph.D. he also held graduate fellowships at Jilin University in China as well as Nagoya University in Japan. He then moved to the University of Bristol as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Ian Manners, followed by a second Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Nanosystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Prof. Craig Hawker. He currently leads a research program examining a variety of questions in synthetic materials chemistry, ranging from the development of solutions for energy-efficient displays and light sources to the self-assembly of electronic materials on the nanoscale.