Education
2003-Present: PhD Princeton University.
Undergraduate: BS, Chemical Engineering, Tshinghua University.
Contact
Lab location:
email: lfu@princeton.edu
About Lin
Hello, I am Lin Fu, a senior graduate student in Bob’s group now. I did my undergraduate study in Tsinghua University, China. And my specialty was polymer. I joined this group in 2003. From then, I started knowing guar – a natural polysaccharide used as the fracturing fluids in oil industry. My thesis work is to study the dynamics and structure of concentrated hydrocolloid polymer networks. The title sounds broad? I can only think of this to name my "thesis" and to cover all the work I have been doing. I was studying the guar filter cake and developed the first molecular-based model for the cake formation process. Not only did I study the formation of filter cake, but I also found a good way to destroy the filter cake-- enzymatic degradation of guar. When the filter cake is condensed, enzymes' diffusion is limiting the degradation reaction. Good to know! We explored fluorine NMR to measure both the translational and rotational diffusivities of enzymes in the concentrated guar network. The results confirmed that enzymes still possess enough mobility to degrade polymer chains even when the polymer networks are condensed.
Cyclodextrin is a circlic sugar structure with hydrophilic exterior and hydrophobic interior. Hydrophobic molecules tend to go inside the hydrophobic cavity and form inclusion complex with cyclodextrin. Right now, I am playing with the special property of CD to design a polymer system with quantitatively controllable rheological properties. The binding between cyclodextrin and the guest hydrophobic molecule can be finely tuned by changing the physical-chemical environment. We have studied both the kinetics and thermodynamics of the binding in bulk and at the interface. Surface plasmon resonance (Biacore) was the fancy instrument I am using these days. I designed a microfluidic chip surface for this SPR study. And I am really enjoying doing this micro-scale study!
There is a lot of fun to play with polymers!
