We cordially invite you to apply to participate in the interactive technical competition “Contemporary Materials Science: How Can Molecular Machines Help?”, co-chaired by Prof. Fraser Stoddart and Dr. Melissa Dumartin, Northwestern Univ.

The competition will be held Friday and Saturday, September 20-21, 2019 near the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Illinois. In order to produce the best results, your attendance is required for all daytime sessions. The optional Feynman Prize Dinner will be Saturday evening.

First round of applications closes June 15th. 

About this Workshop

This meeting is part of Foresight’s invitational technical competition series. These events are highly result-oriented: In two days, multidisciplinary teams of scientists and technologists compete to develop project proposals leveraging their scientific disciplines to address urgent challenges for humanity.

A major motivation for the focus on molecular machines is the tremendous potential to heal the Earth’s environment,  revolutionize medical care for human healthspan and longevity, and develop materials with unprecedented properties and functions including sensing, computation, and actuation. In this workshop, a multidisciplinary group of specialists in target technical areas will collaborate with those tackling the challenges of atomically-precise 3D structures and molecular machines, including construction pathways using chemistry, applied physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and engineering.

Participants will be drawn from a wide variety of fields, not limited to materials science and molecular machines.
 
Areas to be addressed include the design and construction of complex structures and molecular machines built via organic and inorganic chemical synthesis; objects and devices constructed from DNA, RNA, proteins, or biomimetic polymers; construction via scanning probe; and other approaches to building with molecular precision from the bottom up.

Rather than ask each participant to formally present their current research, the process enables all participants to actively use their research, knowledge, and skills in a multidisciplinary group to create new, fundable research proposals. These are then presented to the full group, and a panel of expert judges will select winners in a variety of categories. Videos of all presentations are posted online.

CURRENT INVITEES:

Ivan Aprahamian, Dartmouth Univ.
Dean Astumian, Univ. of Maine
Anna Balazs, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Jeremy Barton, Nanofactory, Inc
Kang Cai, Northwestern Univ.
James Cooper, Northwestern Univ.
Alberto Credi, Univ. of Bologna
William Dichtel, Northwestern Univ.
Tabbetha Dobbins, Rowan Univ.
Martin Edelstein, Covalent / AguaVia
Omar Farha, Northwestern Univ.
Yuanning Feng, Northwestern Univ.
Ben Feringa, Univ. of Gronigen
Amar Flood, Indiana Univ.
David Forrest, US Dept. of Energy (retired)
Danna Freedman, Northwestern Univ.
Nicolas Giuseppone, Univ. of Strasbourg
Bill Goddard, Caltech
Steve Goldup, Univ. of South Hampton
Sossina Haile, Northwestern Univ.
Grace Han, Brandeis Univ
Elizabeth Harbron, William & Mary
Julia Kalow, Northwestern Univ.
Nathalie Katsonis, Univ. of Twente
Yamuna Krishnan, Univ. of Chicago
David Leigh, Manchester Univ
Stephen Loeb, Univ. of Windsor
Tobin Marks, Northwestern Univ.
Chad Mirkin, Northwestern Univ.
Lorenzo Mosca, Northwestern Univ.
Rachel O’Reilly, Univ. of Birmingham
Teri Odom, Northwestern Univ.
Paul Cherukuri, Rice Univ.
Doug Philp, Northwestern Univ.
Yunyan Qiu, Northwestern Univ.
Stuart Rowan, Univ. of Chicago
Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Univ. of Strasbourg
Natalia Shustova, Univ. of South Carolina
Hanadi Sleiman, McGill Univ.
Damien Sluysmans, Univ. of Liège
Durham Smith, Univ of Toronto
Samuel Stupp, Northwestern Univ.
Andrew Sue, Tianjin Univ.
Timothy Swager, MIT
James Tour, Rice Univ.
Michael Wasielewski, Northwestern Univ.
Daniela Wilson, Radboud Univ.

Your participation should speed your current research, explore novel funding sources, assist you in finding multi-disciplinary collaborators, and stimulate entirely new, fundable research projects among participants.

To get an idea of what our technical workshops are like, please see this 2 minute workshop summary video with Sir Fraser Stoddart — who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016 and co-chaired a previous workshop: