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MRSEC Outlines Future of Block Polymer Research
In a recent Science paper entitled "Multiblock polymers: Panacea or Pandora's Box?" polymer researchers from the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Minnesota highlighted the seemingly unlimited potential for new methods in polymer synthesis to create multi block polymers with arbitrary numbers and types of unique sequences, as illustrated in the accompanying figure. While these synthesis strategies offer the potential for highly controllable soft materials, the number of possibilities introduces new engineering challenges to the field. The paper is a collaboration between the UMN MRSEC (Frank Bates, Marc Hillmyer and Tim Lodge), the UCSB MRSEC (Glenn Fredrickson and Kris Delaney) and UT-Austin (Chris Bates). The paper appeared in the April 26th issue of Science.