Kristen Murphy
Graduate Research Assistant
Education
- Ph.D. Candidate in Inorganic Chemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, September 2007-Present
- B.S. in Biochemistry from Biola University, 2007
Industry Experience
- Student Guest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Aug 2007 - April 2009
- Undergraduate Student Researcher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, June 2004 - Aug 2007
Fellowships
- Lawrence Scholar Program, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Aug 2009 - present
Research: Biomolecule Directed Synthesis of Highly Ordered and Nanostructured Porous Zinc Oxide
Zinc oxide (ZnO) is an important II-IV, n-type semiconductor material with interesting optical and piezoelectric properties. These novel properties of ZnO have lead to applications in UV-light emitting diodes, lasers, photovoltaic solar cells, gas sensors, and biosensors with limited success. One of the factors contributing to the limited success of ZnO in the above-mentioned applications is due to the overall lack of control in their surface area, structure and the ability to mass produce these novel materials. We aim to develop a new methodology to synthesize highly ordered nanostructured mesoporous (pore sizes of 5 nm- 50 nm) Zinc oxide with a high surface area.
Supramolecular templating of surfactants and polymers, functionalized with biological molecules (i.e. peptides) will be utilized to achieve this goal. The templating of supramolecular assemblies (i.e. liquid crystals with 3 dimensional structures) of surfactants and amphiphilic has already proven to be a powerful and cost-effective technique for synthesizing a variety of inorganic structures with high surface areas, including SiO2, TiO2, and WO3 among others in mass quantities. However thus far, the synthesis of highly ordered ZnO using the templating of supramolecular assemblies has been limited due to the non-specific interaction between inorganic precursors and structure directing organic templates. This shortcoming in the templating method can be alleviated by introducing biological molecules that are specifically engineered to selectively bind and/or nucleate ZnO nanocrystals. In order to accomplish this goal, unique sets of small peptides that can readily bind and nucleate ZnO nanocrystals will be identified by phage-diplay technique using M13 bacteriophage. The identified peptides will be covalently bonded to structure directing surfactants and polymers. The newly synthesized biopolymer will be used to template ZnO nanocrystals, which will adopt the 3-dimensional structure of the co-assembling biopolymer.
Contact
kmurphy [at] chem.ucsb.edu