This award by the Biomaterials program in the Division of Materials Research to University of California Davis is to provide partial support for the attendance of graduate students, postdocs and young faculty members at a symposium on "Biofunctional Architectures ? Reversible Interactions and Surface Recognition Symposium." This symposium will be held as part of the American Chemical Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California from March 22 to 24, 2010. Scientific themes of the conference will include theoretical, computational modeling and experimental aspects on: a) Biofunctional architectures for targeting and nano-technology; b) Reversibly associating polymer thin-films; c) Dynamics of tethered ligand-receptor interactions; and d) Biomolecular self-assembly on surfaces. This symposium is expected to provide knowledge base for the rapid advancement of computational and experimental work towards elucidating the structures and interactions responsible for the functionality of biological materials found in nature. A key challenge now is to utilize this knowledge towards the development of bio-mimetic systems for technological applications such as drug targeting, biosensing-arrays, biomolecule based devices, medical nanotechnology, and the creation of new materials with ultra functionalities.
Broader impact of the conference is to bring together students, junior scientists and leading researchers from USA and abroad to advance the knowledge base for biofucntional architectures. In addition, this conference is expected to create interactions and collaborations among current and future researchers in the field. Towards this goal, wide dissemination of the scientific information presented and discussed during the symposium will be accomplished through a special issue of Biointerphases, an open access online journal. Articles in this special issue "In Focus" will be after the normal review process and criteria of Biointerphases.
