ABSTRACT
Among different species of biomaterials, silk fibroin has attracted great attention due to its superior mechanical properties such as high stretchability, high strength, biocompatibility, as well as its biodegradability. Here the speaker will demonstrate the efforts made to understand and further enhance the mechanical properties of silk fibroin in terms of strength and toughness combining both experimental and modelling approaches. In addition, the speaker will introduce recent work on interface between biomaterials and nanomaterials based on collaboration with experimental groups and industry partners. It was found that the mechanical properties of biomaterials could be tuned via hybrid with nanomaterials. These results provide in-depth understandings in molecular structure-mechanical property correlation in protein-nanomaterial interface, and will be providing a guideline to future design of bio-inspired materials for biomedical applications, e.g. cutting-edge consumer care products, flexible electronics, etc.

Bio
Dr. Yuan Cheng received her Bachelor degree from the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Fudan University, China in July 2003, and Ph.D degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore in April 2008. Upon completion of her graduate degree, she joined the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) in Singapore as a scientist in 2007 till present. During Feb. till Jun. 2009 she visited Brown University, USA as a visiting scholar. Dr. Yuan Cheng’s research interests involve computational modeling and simulation of nanoscale assembly, as well as mechanical and physical properties of bio-inspired materials, exploring their applications in consumer care industry and wearable devices. She has published more than 50 journal papers in the leading journals including Prog. Polym. Sci., Adv. Mater., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, J. Am. Chem. Soc., etc.