MINING THE NANOSCALE FOR NEW MATERIALS

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Our newest faculty member assembles nanoscale molecular clusters into materials with desirable physical properties.


Nature fabricates the materials of our world from the 90 or so naturally occurring elements. In the research lab of new assistant professor Xavier Roy (see photo), novel materials are assembled from molecular cluster ‘superatoms’ – tunable building blocks that his group designs and synthesizes and are analogous to the atoms in Nature’s building set. Assembling these nanoscale superatoms into artificial molecules and solids will allow the development of new families of materials with tailored physical and chemical properties.


Professor Roy received a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical Engineering) in 2002 and a Master of Applied Science (Chemical Engineering) in 2005 from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal. He was then awarded his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2011 from the University of British Columbia where he was an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Fellow working under the direction of Mark MacLachlan. Professor Roy went on to do research as a Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University working with Colin Nuckolls. You can view his faculty webpage here.

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