Research

Recent interest in reconfigurable materials with responsive electrical, optical, magnetic, mechanical and other properties has led to many exciting studies of molecular switches. The Canary lab focuses on reconfigurable chiral catalysts and has developed a redox-reconfigurable copper complex catalyst derived from L-methionine and urea groups. This catalyst adopts two pseudo-enantiomeric helically chiral states able to...

Our research interest on bioimaging has focused recently on developing fluorescent probes capable of quantitative analysis for Mn2+. Such probes allow real-time imaging with subcellular resolution. Manganese is an essential metal in biological systems, however, it has proven to be very challenging to assay using fluorescent probes. One challenge is the interference from Ca2+, which...

The challenge addressed by this project is the controlled self-assembly of the functioning devices at nanoscale. Self-assembling DNA cassettes, crystals and origami are used as building blocks to assemble 2D and 3D architectures. Redox and pH regulated nano optical modulators were developed through our efforts, innovations which have gained much attention in the scientific community....