Advanced Materials and Molecular Design

Erica Wanless, Adam McCluskey & Alister Page – A pair of cutting-edge chemical synthesis and colloidal dispersion analysis robots – a NSW first in collaboration with UoW and UNSW.

Robert Chapman & Erica Wanless – We're seeking to deconstruct the major commodity plastic polyethylene without creating microplastics – the solution is molecular!

Erica Wanless, Alister Page & Grant Webber (Chemical Engineering) – Why do different salts behave differently? Can we develop new understanding of hypersaline media for high-tech solutions? What happens to salts in nonaqueous solvents?

Erica Wanless & Alister Page – Chemistry underpins a significant fraction of mineral separation technologies and we’re contributing our expertise in this large national centre.

Alister Page, Nikola Bowden, Paul Tooney (Hunter Medical Research Institute) – application of high-throughput in silico drug discovery and machine learning techniques for drug repurposing for ovarian and brain cancer.

Alister Page, Ben Noble & Sam Chen. Application of experimental, computational and machine learning techniques to designing new high-entropy catalysts for producing carbon nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes, nanodiamonds and graphene.

Adam McCluskey & Alister Page. Identification of new drug candidates for treating T-Cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, achieved using automated chemical synthesis guided by closed-loop machine learning algorithms.

Qianqian Shi, Robert Chapman, Sam Chen & Alister Page – We aim to change the traditional way of designing artificial photocatalysts by constructing large-area, ultrathin, and highly flexible artificial leaves using 2D soft plasmonic photocatalysts.

Sam Chen & Alister Page - We are interested in carbon material design by controlled assembly of nano-carbons, such as fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, graphene, nanodiamonds, and their derivatives, into new, long-range ordered structures with tuneable properties.

Sam Chen & Alister Page - We are interested in the novel synthesis for low-dimensional diamonds, including direct and controlled graphite-to-diamond phase transformations under mild conditions and the making of unconventional diamond architectures. We are also interested in exploring boron nitride analogues.

Robert Chapman - We are designing polymers that mimic therapeutic proteins, with a focus on replicating the biological of an anti-cancer protein called “TRAIL”. Because our mimics are synthetic they should be able to sidestep the biological barriers that prevent the use of the native protein as a drug.

Robert Chapman, Ben Noble, Trevor Rapson & Alvin Li (CSIRO) -  We are using a high throughput approach to design polymeric mimics of (1) the nitrogenase enzyme, an important but fragile enzyme in the conversion of nitrogen to ammonia and (2) the expansin protein, a key target for improving gene delivery in plants.

Ben Noble and Rob Chapman - Integrating computational, machine learning, and experimental approaches for the design of photocatalytic chemical recycling processes.