Zhishuai Geng

Education

Undergraduate Institution: Nankai University

Graduate Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology

Biography

Zhishuai received a B.Sc. in Material Chemistry from Nankai University where he was trained as a organic chemist and worked on methodology research on domino process catalyzed by organophosphines with Prof. You Huang. He then joined the Ph.D. program at Georgia institute of technology under the guidance of Prof. M. G. Finn. His thesis topic is fragmentable bicyclo[3.3.1]nonane cationic materials and their applications to nucleic acid delivery and antimicrobial function, which includes physical organic chemistry, polymer synthesis and characterization and chemical biology. During his Ph.D., he received STAMI Graduate Student Fellowship. He joined Hawker group as a postdoctoral researcher in July 2018.

Research

Zhishuai is currently working on 1) developing stereoselective ring opening polymerization strategies and self-assembly study on the resultant stereospecific polymers; 2) altering the properties (thermal, phase transition, ion selective response) of poly(ethylene oxide) by introducing linear/cyclic branches without adding extra structurally different motif, allowing for the development of various property tailored hydrophilic PEO-based polymers for a variety of material applications; 3) developing membranes with tunable geometrical and chemical parameters such as symmetry, connectivity, pore size, and tortuosity to establish a structure-property relationship between membrane architecture and resulting water and solute transport.