BioZone Symposium Keynote: Membranes for Solving Water Challenges: Past Work, Research Overview, and Biomimetic Membranes

Assistant Professor Jay R. Werber
Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/85219414956
Meeting ID: 852 1941 4956
Password: 925809

Keynote speaker at the 2021 BioZone Research Symposium

The incoming Advanced Membranes Lab will focus on the development of membrane materials and processes for highly selective aqueous separations. The lab’s expertise in separation science and polymeric materials will offer great potential for collaborations with BioZone researchers on projects such as in situ product recovery, dewatering, bioseparations, and protein-based materials. In the first half of this talk, I will provide brief overviews of my past work, our planned research projects in several areas of membrane science, and the general capabilities that the Advanced Membranes Lab will attain. I will then discuss biomimetic membranes, in which the selective layer mimics the structure and performance of cell membranes by incorporating biological or synthetic water channels within a bilayer of lipids or amphiphilic block copolymers. The canonical example uses aquaporin, a membrane protein water channel that is perfectly selective for water. My previous research on this subject explored the permeability/selectivity limits of these materials using model systems. Future work in this area will aim at creating functional biomimetic membranes.

Bio:

Jay Werber will lead the Advanced Membranes Lab as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, starting July 2021. He is currently a postdoctoral associate in chemistry at the University of Minnesota, where he works on the synthesis of high-performance block-copolymer materials for aqueous separations. He received a Ph.D. in chemical and environmental engineering from Yale University, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and an Abel Wolman Fellow through the American Water Works Association. At Yale, Jay studied the permeability and selectivity limits of polymeric, biomimetic, and nanomaterial-based desalination membranes. Prior to his graduate studies, Jay received a B.S. in chemical engineering, with a minor in biology, from Washington University in St. Louis, after which he spent four years designing industrial protein separation processes at the biopharmaceutical company Genentech.