Séminaire découverte : Bio-fabrication of Functional Materials

Noémie-Manuelle Dorval Courchesne
Professeure adjointe
Department of chemical engineering, Université McGill

Nature has evolved microorganisms, proteins and biopolymers with fascinating shapes and functionalities.  Exquisite properties of biological materials include their ability to nucleate particles, bind molecules, catalyze reactions and participate in complex event cascades.  As engineers, we can learn lessons from nature to design novel systems, and we also have the extraordinary power to modify nature to our desire.  In fact, biological materials are highly versatile, modular, and easy to engineer genetically to precisely introduce a variety of functional groups.  In this talk, I will describe the tremendous potential of natural systems as tools to fabricate functional devices.

I will highlight three exquisite properties of biological materials: 1) their versatility in terms of self-assembly, nanostructure formation and genetic engineering; 2) their potential for serving as scaffolds to re-create physical properties that are not normally observed in soft biological matter; and 3) their inexpensive, environmentally-friendly and scalable production to assemble macroscopic materials that can be used to solve real-life problems. 

** La conférence sera donnée en anglais / Talk will be in English **

Biography
Noémie-Manuelle Dorval Courchesne is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at McGill University. Previously, she completed a double undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Chemical Engineering (Biotechnology) at the University of Ottawa.  She then earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 2015, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard until 2017. Her research focuses on the development of protein-based materials with novel physical properties, and on the fabrication of functional biologically-derived devices. Her research group applies materials science, bioengineering, and nanotechnology principles to address energy and environmental challenges.