Goodwin Lecture

October 26, 2023, 4:00 PM
Jim and Sandy Hall Auditorium, 135 Gates-Thomas
Reception to follow in Gates-Thomas 235

The Lecture is in memory of David G. Goodwin, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, Emeritus, who passed away on November 11, 2012. Professor Goodwin was best known for developing ways to grow thin films of high-purity diamond. Diamond films—transparent, scratch-resistant, and efficient dissipaters of the heat generated by high-powered computer chips—are now routinely used to protect electronic and optical components, and diamond-coated drill bits can be found at any hardware store.

The Lecture will be held annually and is made possible by the Division of Engineering and Applied Science and the support of family, friends and colleagues through donations to the David G. Goodwin Memorial Fund.

Experimental Optimization of Polymer-based Organic Electronics

Martha Grover, Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology

Data science approaches have yielded pathways toward "big data analytics" for the accelerated development of many material systems. However, major challenges exist in applying widespread, data-driven approaches to facilitate the accelerated development of electronic devices formulated from polymer semiconductors. Such polymer materials have demonstrated unprecedented performance for flexible, stretchable, and deformable device applications, though their discovery remains largely trial-and-error. A foremost challenge is the availability of experimental data that can yield the requisite knowledge necessary to inform robust performance and formulation precision at the manufacturing scale. The reliability of available experimental data to this end, such as in literature, is hindered by the need to interrogate the relevant process parameters and structural features in both solution and in thin film. This presentation details progress on the implementation of informatics methodologies for the development of polymer-based organic semiconductor technologies. The integration of high throughput experimentation laboratory techniques offers an avenue to traverse the small data gap afforded by the organic semiconductor parameter space. Robust data management systems provide a foundation for schema design and solutions for the challenges in small, sparse, materials data. Finally, the incorporation of "small data analytics" approaches on literature datasets provides a foundation for informing sequential experiments from which π-conjugated polymer domain knowledge can be extracted.

Martha Grover is a Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies. She is the ADVANCE Professor for the College of Engineering and holds a joint appointment at Savannah River National Laboratory. She earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech, with a minor in Control and Dynamical Systems. She joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2003. In 2011 she received the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE, and in 2018 the Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education. Her research program is dedicated to understanding, modeling, and engineering the self-assembly of atoms and small molecules to create larger scale structures and complex functionality. Her approach draws on systems engineering, combining modeling and experiments in applications dominated by kinetics, including film deposition, crystal growth, and origins of life chemistry.