June Meeting (Zoom) 6/9/21

Super-Soft Elastomers: A New Spin on Age-Old Materials

Traditional elastomers-for example, rubber bands and car tires-have an inescapable lower bound on stiffness that limits their performance in many advanced applications. This talk will discuss a relatively new class of materials, known as super-soft elastomers, which overcomes this limitation by exploiting a molecular architecture known as "bottlebrush" polymers. Dr. Bates' research group and collaborators have developed simple synthetic strategies to create bottlebrush polymers and versatile processing techniques to form super-soft elastomers with light. He will demonstrate the utility of this material platform in the context of high-sensitivity pressure sensors and 3D printing.

Dr. Christopher M. Bates earned a B.S. degree in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 under the guidance of C. Grant Willson. After a postdoc with Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech, Christopher moved to UCSB in 2016 as an Assistant Professor in the Materials Department. He also serves as Associate Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UCSB.