Invited
Active polymeric microfibers: From shape-shifting to micro-reactors

In recent years there has been an ongoing endeavor to develop and construct nano- and microscale systems which can change their physical, chemical, or mechanical properties in a response to their environment. In this talk, I will demonstrate new approaches to design and fabricate microscale active polymeric fibers which change their properties when exposed to an external trigger, describe their behavior, and discuss the mechanisms that govern it. In particular, I will focus on two active systems which were developed in our lab: chemically tailored microfibers that transform into micro-reactors for in-situ growth of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and self-cleaving fibers which spontaneously fragment into micro-cylinders with homogeneous size distributions.