Rebecca Schulman, who joined the department in 2011, has been promoted to associate professor with tenure.
The Schulman group designs intelligent materials and devices using techniques from DNA nanotechnology. The goal of the group is to understand how to build complex chemical systems for autonomous self-assembly, pattern formation, and detection and response. Major themes include self-assembly of active molecular structures and complex metamorphosis, environmentally adaptive self-assembly, and intelligent surface interactions. DNA nanotechnology enables the design of complex molecular self-assembly processes involving hundreds of different species that produce structures with virtually arbitrary features at the nanoscale. The Schulman group develops these techniques and uses them to produce structures that can be used to develop new assays and therapeutics for biologists, molecular assembly lines, and templates for molecular circuits. Another major direction of the group is the development of DNA-based materials in which we use molecular logic to produce and respond to chemical gradients and program precise physical motion in soft materials.
Dr. Schulman received her B.S in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999) and her Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology (2007). She was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2008 to 2011.