Graduate students Noalle Fellah and Keke Zhang (Tianjin University), in collaboration with Dr. Vilmalí López-Mejías (University of Puerto Rico), report the polymorphic behavior of flufenamic acid under nanoscale confinement. Whereas previous reports have demonstrated that nanoconfinement can alter (thermodynamic) polymorph stability rankings, these results illustrate that nanoscale confinement can arrest and alter phase transformations kinetics such that otherwise hidden pathways can be observed. Find the article here.

Investigators from the NYU Molecular Design Institute and the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a new crystal polymorph of deltamethrin, a widely-used contact insecticide used for malaria prevention,, which is more than 10 times as effective against mosquitoes compared with the currently used version. The team included Jingxiang Yang, Bryan Erriah, Chunhua T. Hu, Ethan Reiter, Xiaolong Zhu, Mike Ward and Bart Kahr from NYU, and Vilmalí López-Mejías and Isis Paola Carmona-Sepúlveda from the UPR. Find the article here.

“Reinventing the Wheel” Illustrates digital art produced by Kenneth Jacob Ward (1982-2019), created during his tenure as Professorial Lecturer at American University in Washington DC. This art collection builds upon Kenneth’s passion to reveal the relationship between mathematics and art, hooking you with its beauty, symmetry and structure, and holding you with its humanity. Book available from blurb.com at cost here.

Graduate students Mingzhu Liu, Fangyuan Dong and Nicolle Jackson describe a synthetic strategy for the fabrication of multicomponent colloidal “molecules” with controllable complex morphologies and compositionally distinct lobes, enabling a scalable bulk synthesis of customized chiral colloidal particles with geometric and compositional chirality by a sequential seeded growth method. The synthetic protocol presents a versatile platform for constructing colloidal molecules with multiple components having customized shapes and functionalities, with the potential to impact the design of chromatic patchy particles, colloidal swimmers, and chiral optical materials, as well as informing programmable assembly. Find the article here.

Molecular Design Institute graduate students Fangyuan Dong, Mingzhu Liu and Veronica Grebe reported in Chemistry of Materials nineteen uniquely shaped anisotropic colloids that form ordered crystals under dielectrophoretic fields. The various particle shapes resulted in crystalline phases with p6m, cmm or p2 plane group symmetries, two plastic phases, and a disordered phase. The observations establish a relationship between particle shape and the resulting 2D structures, providing guidance for the design of 2D colloidal crystals. Link to the article here.

Undergraduate Sishuang Tang, graduate students Anna Yusov, Yuantao Li and Melissa Tan, visiting student Yunhui Hao, and Tony Hu teamed up to demonstrate that ROY, a compound known to form ten polymorphs with red, orange or yellow colors as a consequence of conformational flexibility, can be included in various guanidinium organosulfonate hydrogen-bonded frameworks that limit its conformational twisting out of plane. The publication was included in a special issue dedicated to Nobel Laureate Jean-Marie Lehn on the event of his 80th birthday. Link to the article here.

Postdoc Marcel Handke, graduate students Yang Wu and Yuantao Li, and Tony Hu discovered that the ubiquitous luminophore [Ru(bpy)3]2+ can be sequestered as a guest in an unusual guanidinium organosulfonate host framework architecture that guides the [Ru(bpy)3]2+ into 1D zigzag chains that suggest unique through-space energy transfer characteristics. Link to the article here.

Undergraduate members of the Ward lab, Sishuang Tang and Mengdi Qiu, celebrated their graduation from New York University in May 2020. Congrats!

Visiting student Keke Zhang (Tianjin University), Noalle Fellah, Alex Shtukenberg and Tony Hu report new polymorphs of the frontline tuberculosis drug isoniazid in CrystEngComm. Link to the article here.

Noalle Fellah, Alex Shtukenberg, and coworkers report in Crystal Growth & Design the structure of a new (fourth) polymorph of benzamide, a simple derivative of benzoic acid and a common intermediate of pharmaceutical compounds. The highly disordered form exhibits a bewildering crystallographic complexity due to 2D stacking faults and organizes like a mismatched stack of building blocks. Link to the article here.

Quentin Brosseau, Florencio Usabiaga, Enkeleida Lushi and Yang Wu report in Physical Review Letters exploring the behavior of micron-scale autophoretic Janus (Au/Pt) rods, with various (Au/Pt) length ratios, swimming near a wall in an imposed background flow. They find that the ability of the Au/Pt rods to robustly orient and move upstream, i.e., to rheotax, depends strongly on the Au/Pt ratio, which is easily tunable in synthesis. Link to the article here.