Fall Colloquium Series: Will Jacobs

Free-energy landscapes and one-dimensional reaction coordinates are staples of chemical analysis.  However, the predictive power of these standard approaches is insufficient for many problems at the frontier of Chemistry, including efforts to understand self-organization in living systems and to design multicomponent materials.  In this talk, I will highlight three examples in which new theoretical frameworks significantly improve our ability to predict the large-scale behavior of complex systems from molecular details.  First, I will show how we can predict the phase behavior of mixtures in which irreversible chemical reactions maintain the system out of equilibrium, as is common in living cells.  Second, I will show how we can control the precise compositions of many coexisting phases in multicomponent polymer solutions, demonstrating how phase-separated compartments in living cells achieve biomolecular specificity.  Third, I will show how we can directly optimize the self-assembly kinetics of designer crystalline materials, resulting in improved assembly yields when kinetic factors govern the outcome of experiments.  These new theoretical approaches can be applied to facilitate mechanistic understanding, first-principles prediction, and rational design across broad classes of complex chemical systems such as living cells and biomimetic materials.