About the Seminar:

The programmed assembly of nanoscale building blocks offers exciting new avenues to create materials in which structure and functions can be chemically designed and tuned. In this context, the synthesis of inorganic molecular clusters with atomically defined structures, compositions and surface chemistry provides a rich family of functional building elements. This presentation will describe our efforts to assemble such “designer atoms” into a variety of hierarchical structures in which the preformed clusters emulate the role of atoms in traditional “atomic” solids. The resulting materials offer a unique opportunity to combine programmable building blocks and atomic precision. As such, they bridge traditional crystalline semiconductors, molecular solids, and nanocrystal arrays by synergizing some of their most attractive features. Recent synthetic advances to develop this concept into a “modular” platform for materials design will be presented, along with some of the unique collective material properties (magnetic, optical, electrical and thermal transport) that emerge as a result of the atomic precision of the crystal lattice and the specific interactions between the building blocks. The presentation will conclude with an assessment of future developments.

About the Speaker:

Xavier Roy received a B.Eng. (2002) and a Master of Applied Science (2005) in Chemical Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, performing research under the guidance of Prof. Basil Favis. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry with Prof. Mark MacLachlan at the University of British Columbia in 2011, working as an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Scholar. He went on to do postdoctoral research as a Canada NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Colin Nuckolls at Columbia University from 2011 to 2013. He joined the Columbia University Faculty in 2013 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry, and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2018.