Unraveling the Relationship Between Molecular Design and Charge Transport in Self-Assembling Systems

Organic semiconductors emerge as a class of alternative materials for electronic applications. These materials offer tunable optoelectronic properties through chemical synthesis and modification, low production cost, relatively easy and flexible processing, and potential for large-area applications. Achieving efficient charge transport in these...

Reversible allylic substitution based responsive polymer materials

Signal transduction in living systems enables adaptive and interactive response to external stimuli. These rudimentary primary processes developed by nature are currently absent in synthetic materials. Implementing these processes in materials can have widespread advances in regenerative medicine, diagnostics or nanomachines. Taking inspiration...

Applications of Dynamic Covalent Bonds in Chemical Reaction Networks

Nature has inspired countless researchers in their quest to understand the phenomena we observe and utilise their findings to develop new technologies. This becomes especially apparent in systems chemistry, which heavily draws inspiration from natural systems in its pursuit for the understanding and development of chemical reaction networks ...

Catalysis to control targeted response in supramolecular systems

Living cells adapt to changes of their environment through a cascade of chemical reactions regulated by enzymes. Each cellular pathway contains a series of enzymes, which are capable of receiving and translating a specific chemical or physical signal into a biological response. Taking inspiration from nature, enzymatic mechanisms can be...

Shedding Light on Electrochemically Doped Semiconductors: Photochemical Stabilization of the Charge Density in Quantum Dots and Organic Semiconductors

To utilize the full potential of semiconductor materials in device applications including solar cells, LEDs, and lasers, the ability to precisely and controllably tune the charge carrier concentration and hence the doping density is crucial. The conventional methods such as impurity doping with thermal diffusion or ion implantation, have been...

Host-guest complexation integrated in chemical reaction networks

Nature has proven to be a great source of inspiration for scientific research and technological innovation in various areas: food, medicine, architecture, chemistry, materials, algorithms, and many other fields. At the basis of sophisticated functions associated with life in nature are all kinds of chemical reactions which are mainly regulated...

Stimuli Sensitive Polymer Materials For Signal Transduction

Smart materials are materials that are capable of responding in a programmable and predictive manner. Such materials respond to a broad variety of internal and external triggers and modulate one or more material properties accordingly. Common material responses are controlled release, color changes, morphological changes or changing the...

Application of poly(ε-caprolactone-b-ethylene oxide) micelles combined with ionizing radiation in cancer treatment

The focus of this thesis is on the utilization of biodegradable drug nanocarriers combined with ionizing radiation in cancer treatment. Polymeric micelles based on PCL-PEO block copolymers were selected as the main platform for delivering various therapeutic substances due to their size, degradability and easy preparation. This thesis can...

Dynamic Polymer Hydrogels through Reversible Thiol Conjugate Addition Crosslinks

This thesis describes the experimental development of new dynamic hydrogels based on reversible thiol conjugate additions. Redox-controlled hydrogels and self-healing injectable hydrogels have been achieved by introducing reversible thiol conjugate additions to crosslink polymers, leading to hydrogel formation. The overall objective in this...

Catalysis in fuel-driven chemical reaction networks

The entire research described in this thesis is part of the larger field of Systems Chemistry. This field of chemistry deals with the understanding of the complexity of biology by mimicking biochemical reaction networks with emergent properties attributed to the entire system. In particular, this research focuses on the design of artificial non...

Catalytic control in out-of-equilibrium assembly systems

Nature is capable of constantly adapting some of its assembled structures in response to external and internal signals. For instance, microtubuli grow and shrink upon cell division and cellular transport. Furthermore, actin fibers play a major role in muscle contraction and cell signaling. To achieve these transient functions, such assembled...

Self-Sorting and Directed Molecular Self-Assembly towards New Soft Materials

Molecular self-assembly has been realized as a powerful approach to control the organization of materials from molecular to macroscopic length scale. While for a long time molecular self-assembly has focused on the investigation of systems involving a single component and under thermodynamic equilibrium. In recent years the interests are...

Responsive organocatalysis in soft materials

Cells react to the environment by changing the activity of enzymes. Catalysts, such as enzymes, speed up reaction rates by lowering the activation energy of the reaction. Changing reaction rates by altering enzyme activity is used to temporarily increase the production of, for instance, a hormone or to change the mechanical properties of a cell....

Out-of-equilibrium self-assembly approaches for new soft materials

Living creatures exists for an important part out of soft material, such as skin, organs and cells, that are out-of-equilibrium formed by the self-assembly of molecular building blocks. Natural materials are continuously active with dynamic processes occurring, such as growth, shrinkage and transport mechanisms under the consumption of energy....

Multicomponent and Dissipative Self-Assembly Approaches: Towards functional materials

The use of self-assembly has proven to be a powerful approach to create smart and functional materials and has led to a vast variety of successful examples. However, the full potential of self-assembly has not been reached. Despite the number of successful artificial materials based on self-assembly, the corresponding structures do not compete...