Rachel Blau

Congratulations to Rachel Blau, Zuckerman Israeli Postdoctoral Scholar (alumna) at the Department of NanoEngineering at UCSD, on the publication of “Room-Temperature Viscoelastic Liquid Semiconducting Block Copolymer with Mixed Ionic-Electronic Conduction” in Journal of the American Chemical Society. The study describes a new soft semiconductor that is designed to work more comfortably with biological tissue and can move both ion-based and electron-based signals. This helps connect the language of the body with the language of electronic devices and could support the development of more compatible bioelectronic technologies.

Abstract:
Bioelectronic devices benefit from materials that have tissue-like levels of softness and good conductive coupling to biological structures. Conventional conjugated polyelectrolyte complexes…have favorable levels of mixed ionic-electronic conductivity, but have high elastic stiffness, typically reflected in Young’s moduli in the GPa range. Soft ionic conductors, such as ionogels, offer extreme deformability but generally lack the semiconducting mixed ionic-electronic transport required for signal transduction and amplification.