William M. Jacobs to Join Princeton Chemistry Faculty

The Department of Chemistry at Princeton University is pleased to welcome William M. Jacobs to the faculty as an assistant professor effective July 1, 2019.

Jacobs most recently conducted postdoctoral research working with Eugene Shakhnovich at Harvard where he was a recipient of an NIH-Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. Jacobs earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry in the lab of Daan Frenkel at the University of Cambridge, where he studied multicomponent phase separation.

Taking inspiration from biology, the goal of the Jacobs Lab is to identify general principles governing the assembly of complex, molecular-scale structures. Jacobs is primarily interested in how two key features of living matter — the heterogeneity of multicomponent systems and the production of entropy by active processes — affect the properties of self-assembled structures. Current efforts focus on predicting spatial organization in phase-separating protein/nucleic-acid mixtures and developing non-equilibrium strategies to optimize the assembly of multicomponent nanostructures.