Title： Polymerisation-Induced Self-Assembly in Aqueous Media

Time：10:00 AM on August 27, 2026

Location：C3-c204, GuangzhouInternational Campus,SCUT

Speaker：Steven Armes （University of Sheffield）

Abstract：

Polymerisation-induced self-assembly (PISA) is a powerful and versatile technique for the rational synthesis of concentrated dispersions of block copolymer nano-objects of controllable size, shape and surface chemistry.In essence, an insoluble block is grown from one end of a soluble block in a suitable solvent. Once the growing block reaches a certain critical degree of polymerisation, micellar nucleation occurs and the soluble block then acts as a steric stabiliser. Unreacted monomer diffuses into the copolymer cores, which leads to a relatively high local concentration and hence a significant rate acceleration. Depending on the target diblock copolymer composition, the final copolymer morphology can be spheres, worms or vesicles. The design rules for PISA are generic: such syntheses may be conducted in water, polar solvents or non-polar solvents using reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerisation. In this lecture, I will focus on PISA syntheses conducted in aqueous media. In early work, we reported the synthesis of thermoresponsive worm gels, which have potential biomedical applications. More recently, we have developed a new reverse sequence PISA formulation that enables the efficient synthesis of hydrolytically degradable diblock copolymer nanoparticles directly in concentrated aqueous media. Typically, spherical nanoparticles are obtained but if this approach is combined with crystallisation-driven self-assembly (CDSA) under appropriate conditions then highly anisotropic nanoparticles such as rods or diamond platelets can also be obtained.