ChemE welcomes David Lynn (and Helen Blackwell)

David M. Lynn (19K JPG)

In 1999, two new PhD's from the research group of organic chemist Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech won prestigious postdoctoral fellowship awards and headed across country: Helen E. Blackwell to work with Stuart Schreiber at Harvard, and David M. Lynn with a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship to work with Robert Langer at MIT. This summer the two plan to marry and move to Madison: Helen to join the faculty in the UW Department of Chemistry, and Dave to join the chemical engineering faculty here.

Dave's academic experience positions him ideally to pursue research in the development of novel materials for biomedical applications. He gained considerable research experience in polymer science as an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina, where he received his BA with honors in chemistry. At Caltech, Dave received broad exposure to the fundamentals of organic chemistry, polymer synthesis, and transition metal catalysis. He gained experience with a class of "living" polymerization reactions that allows production of polymers with very narrow ranges of molecular weights, and that is superior for making block copolymers with tailored properties. Dave's work at Caltech led to seven publications in leading journals and three patent applications, and he received the department's McKoy Award for distinguished graduate research.

Through his postdoctoral work at MIT, Dave added to his expertise in polymer synthesis many of the techniques and approaches needed for development of biomaterials. In Langer's laboratory, Dave worked with a unique family of biodegradable polymers to create new microspheres and nanocomplexes that transfer DNA into cells, an approach that could be useful for the development of new non-viral approaches to gene therapy. He also developed an accelerated discovery method for polymeric gene delivery systems, and identified several new polymers that are more effective than conventional materials in delivering genes in cell-based assays. This work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and further reviewed in Chemical and Engineering News.

Related article: "Designing polymers for biomedical applications"