MSE Seminar: Kayla Sprenger

Event interval: Single day event
Accessibility Contact: Matthew Yankowitz, myank@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars

Title: Engineering Polymer Interfaces via Multiscale Modeling Across Sustainability and Health.

Abstract: Plastic waste, materials sustainability, and biomaterial performance represent interconnected challenges that require molecular-level understanding across a wide range of polymer systems. In the Rationally Designed Immunotherapeutics and Interfaces (RDI) Lab, we leverage multiscale computational approaches to interrogate and engineer polymer interfaces spanning applications across sustainability and health. Central to our work is the idea that molecular interactions at polymer interfaces govern macroscopic properties including degradation behavior, catalytic reactivity, material performance, and biological response. This seminar will highlight how advanced in silico approaches, including reactive molecular dynamics simulations and enhanced sampling methods, can provide molecular-scale insight into complex polymer systems relevant to the plastics circular economy and next-generation biomaterials. First, I will discuss our work investigating polymer/metal oxide interfaces relevant to catalytic plastics upcycling and hydrogenolysis, with the goal of understanding how interfacial chemistry influences degradation pathways and catalytic reactivity for mixed plastic waste streams. I will then describe our efforts to investigate polymer/enzyme interfaces governing PET biodegradation, including computational identification of mutations that may improve PET-degrading enzyme activity and stability.

Beyond improving strategies for degrading existing plastics, our lab is also focused on designing sustainable materials from the ground up. Accordingly, a major focus of the talk will center on our investigations of biomatter-derived bioplastics composed of biologically derived components including proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and polymers. By integrating molecular simulations with collaborators’ experimental thermomechanical processing and spectroscopy data, we seek to uncover how molecular composition and intermolecular interactions influence the emergent structure and properties of these sustainable materials. Finally, I will briefly discuss how many of the same computational frameworks developed for sustainable polymer systems can be extended to biomedical polymer interfaces, including polymer-protein bioconjugates and polymer-based coatings designed to stabilize proteins and mitigate inflammatory foreign body responses to implanted biomaterials. Collectively, these studies showcase how multiscale modeling can accelerate rational engineering of polymer interfaces across applications spanning plastics circularity, sustainable materials, and health.

Bio: Kayla G. Sprenger, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Sprenger received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2017 from the University of Washington-Seattle with Dr. Jim Pfaendtner. Her Ph.D. was focused on the development and use of molecular simulation tools to study the structure and function of biomolecules at interfaces. She completed her postdoctoral studies in 2020 at MIT in the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science with Dr. Arup Chakraborty, developing agent-based models of stochastic biological processes. Her lab at CU Boulder is now focused on utilizing multiscale computational approaches to understand and engineer interfaces for broad applications ranging from sustainable energy to health and medicine.