Title and Affiliation:

Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis and University Reader in Supramolecular and Polymer Chemistry

Lecture title:

Dynamic Host-Guest Interactions at the Interface between Supramolecular Chemistry and Materials Science

Short autobiography:

Oren Scherman graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a BA in Chemistry in 1999. He then moved to Pasadena, California, where he completed a PhD in 2004 in the area of olefin metathesis and controlled polymerisation, under the supervision of Professor Robert H. Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). After finishing his PhD, Oren moved to the Netherlands to work on supramolecular polymers with Professors E.W. Meijer and Rint P. Sijbesma at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In 2006, he moved to the University of Cambridge to take up an academic appointment as a University Lecturer and Next Generation Fellow in the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in the Department of Chemistry. In 2012, he was promoted to Reader in Supramolecular and Polymer Chemistry and in March 2013, he was appointed as the Director of the Melville Laboratory. His research group is interested in dynamic supramolecular self assembly at interfaces. Oren’s current research projects include the application of macrocyclic host-guest chemistry using cucurbit[n]urils in the development of novel supramolecular hydrogels, drug-delivery systems based on dynamic hydrogels, the conservation and restoration of important historical artefacts through the exploitation of supramolecular polymer chemistry and sensing and catalysis using self-assembled nanophotonic systems. Oren is also a co-founder of the recent spin-out company aqdot from Cambridge University working in the area of encapsulation. He is currently on sabbatical as the Xuetang Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Research Interests:

- supramolecular self assembly in water

- dynamic hydrogels

- encapsulation and self-assembled nanophotonic systems