MIT Polymer Day 2025: Project Details & Highlights!

Image from MIT Polymer 2025 from their official website (https://ppsm.mit.edu/polymer-day-2025/)

On May 7th, I had the pleasure of taking a trip to Cambridge and being a co-presenter at this year's MIT Polymer Day! Polymer Day, which is hosted by active members of the Polymer Graduate Student Association (PGSA), is a one-day poster fair/conference that spotlights researchers from a variety of institutions who are pioneering polymer and soft matter research. I had the honor of accompanying and co-presenting the research I do at the City College of New York on bioinspired ferroelectrics with my mentor, Fariha Reza.

I want to say a big thanks to Fariha and the members of the PGSA for hosting such an awesome event! I hope to be back next year :)

Below you can find some information on the project and photo highlights!

Title: Harnessing Peptides for Ferroelectric Innovation: Fabrication and Characterization of Peptide-Polymer Composite Thin Films

Abstract: The project aims to explore whether bioinspired polymer science can play a role in the development of electroactive polymers, both for the purpose of sustainability for the circular economy, and in the creation of novel materials for new electronics technology. Plastic waste and microplastics pollution and toxicity is a major global problem facing humanity for the 21st century. Bioinspiration can present a variety of alternative, creative, and sustainable solutions towards the redesign of materials. We ask whether ferroelectric fluoropolymers, such as Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and Polyvinylidene Fluoride Trifluoroethylene (PVDF-TrFE), could be replaced by bioinspired polymers that would ideally degrade in the environment and cause minimum toxicological damage. For a baseline, we reviewed commercially available polymers PLA, PHA and compared them to PVDF and PVDF-TrFE. The electrical behavior was recorded as electric polarization (mC/cm2) versus voltage (V), taken in the range of 20-500V. We developed a platform for preparing polymer-peptide composites as a means to explore the influence of dipeptides on ferroelectric properties of the PVDF-TrFE.

Link to MIT Polymer Day 2025 Program Booklet to check out some titles of other interesting research! https://ppsm.mit.edu/polymer-day-2025/