On March 24, Prof. Julian X.X.Zhu from Université de Montréal was invited to the School Of Emergent Soft Matter to give a lecture on Molecular and Macromolecular Hydrogels and Marginal Solubility to share his group's innovative work in the design, preparation and application of biomedical polymer materials (including stimuli-responsive polymer hydrogels, bile acid-modified polymers, etc.).

According to Prof. Julian X.X.Zhu, bile acid is a natural compound found in humans and most animals.In the form of salts or after appropriate chemical modifications, they can interact in specific solvents to form gels with self-assembled fiber networks, i.e. molecular gels, which have potential applications in tissue engineering, cell culture and mechano-optical sensing, and are functional materials widely used in biomedical and pharmaceutical fields.At low concentrations, these nanofibers separate from each other, while at high concentrations, they entangle with each other and form hydrogels with a well-dispersed, randomly arranged three-dimensional fiber network. The experimental results show that a critical dissolution condition is required for molecules to form gels in water.

Prof. Julian X.X. Zhu is a senior distinguished professor at Université de Montréal and a renowned polymer scientist in Canada. His main research areas include polymer functionalization of natural biomolecules and their applications in medicine and the environment, application of NMR techniques, combinatorial chemical organic synthesis, molecular micelle template imprinting polymerization techniques, etc. He has innovative research in hydrogels, degradable polymers, drug delivery and dental materials, focusing on the preparation of novel polymeric materials using natural compounds through green chemistry. To date, he has published more than 300 academic papers and many patents, which have been cited more than 3300 times.