When the Empire State Building was constructed, its 102 stories rose above midtown one piece at a time, with each individual element combining to become, for 40 years, the world’s tallest building. Uptown at Columbia, Oleg Gang and his chemical engineering lab aren’t building Art Deco architecture; their landmarks are incredibly small devices built from nanoscopic building blocks that arrange themselves.
“We can now build the complexly prescribed 3D organizations from self-assembled nanocomponents, a kind of nanoscale version of the Empire State Building,” said Gang, professor of chemical engineering and of applied physics and materials science at Columbia Engineering and leader of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials’ Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
“The capabilities to manufacture 3D nanoscale materials by design are critical for many emerging applications, ranging from light manipulation to neuromorphic computing, and from catalytic materials to biomolecular scaffolds and reactors,” said Gang.