Tuesday, 8 July 2025 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 4

Speaker: Professor Harm-Anton Klok

Host: A/Prof. Markus Muellner

Title: Expanding the Scope of Surface-Initiated Polymerisation

Abstract
Surface-grafted polymer thin films, which are commonly referred to as polymer brushes, have emerged as a unique class of surface coatings. Chain-end tethering polymers in close proximity using surface-initiated polymerization methodologies enforces a stretched conformation of the polymer grafts, which leads to several unique materials properties. Polymer brush films, for example, can be designed that are exceptionally effective in preventing biofouling, or which possess extraordinarily low friction coefficients.

This presentation will highlight three recent discoveries from our laboratory that take advantage of surface-initiated polymerization reactions to generate polymer surface coatings with unique properties. In a first example, it will be shown how surface-grafted polymer films can be designed and prepared that display piezo- and pyroelectric properties, which is of great interest e.g. for energy harvesting applications. In a second example, it will be shown how, for a polymer film of a given thickness and composition, solvent uptake and swelling can be controlled, essentially by molecular engineering at the polymer brush – substrate interface. Since solvent swelling is essential to non-fouling and lubrication applications, this provides a new approach to engineer such properties. Finally, it will be shown how concepts from supramolecular chemistry can be harnessed to generate surface-grafted polymer films that potentially could be grown and removed in a repetitive, reversible manner.

Bio
Harm-Anton Klok is Full Professor at the Institutes of Materials, and Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) (Lausanne, Switzerland). He studied chemical technology at the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands) from 1989 to 1993 and received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Ulm (Germany) after working with Martin Möller. After postdoctoral research with David N. Reinhoudt (University of Twente) and Samuel I. Stupp (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA), he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Mainz, Germany) in early 1999 as a project leader in the group of Klaus Müllen. In November 2002, he was appointed to the faculty of EPFL. He directs the Molecular and Hybrid Materials Characterization Center at EPFL, and from 2012 – 2025 he served as Director of the Institute of Materials (~ Department Head),.

His research interests include polymer surface and interface science, polymer nanomedicine and polymer synthesis and functionalization.

Harm-Anton Klok is recipient of the Arthur K. Doolittle Award of the American Chemical Society (2007), and was honored with a Distinguished Scientist Award by the Chinese Academy of Sciences President’s International Fellowship Initiative (2020). He has been Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society journal Biomacromolecules (2007 – 2021), and is currently Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society journal ACS Polymers Au. He also serves or has served on the editorial advisory board of Eur. Polym. J., J. Polym. Sci. A: Polym. Chem., Macromolecules, ACS Macro Letters as well as Macromol. Rapid Commun., Macromol. Bioscience, and ACS Applied Bio Materials. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux (France) and the University of Massachusetts/Amherst (USA), is a Chair Professor at the College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University (Suzhou, China), guest professor at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun (China), Shanghai University (Shanghai, China) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), was awarded a Chinese Academy of Sciences visiting professorship for senior international scientists (Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing), and has been a Miller Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley.