Research Interests: Machine learning, Computational chemistry, Polymers, Biomolecules
Soft matters including a wide range of materials fromliquids, polymers, gels,to biomoleculescan be found in our daily lifeas well asadvanced high-tech areas. Designing new soft materialsis fundamental to the development of novel technologies for chemical and biological applications.Achievingtargeted structures/properties of materialsinvolveslots of experimental efforts,consideringthe large diversityof chemical functional groups and the complicatedexperimental conditionssuch as temperatures, pressures and electric fields, etc. Computational simulations are goodand cheaptools tohelp understand theâfunctional groupsâ- structure-property relationshipsof materials and provide guidelines for new material design.Coarse-grained(CG)molecular dynamics(MD)simulationshave beenwidely used to studysoft materialsuch as polymers andbiomolecules. Thesemacromolecules usually undergo complicated processesproceeding for tens to hundreds ofmicroseconds.We firstly developed accurate coarse-grained models of a wide range of materials from water, hydrocarbons to polymers,i.e.,poly(acrylic acid)(PAA)and polystyrene(PS). The newly developed polymer models were used to build the block polymers and bottlebrush copolymers.The self-assembly of block polymers and the conformation transition of bottlebrush copolymers were investigated byCGMD simulations. It was foundthe self-assembled nanospheres were obtained by the CG PAA-PS block models. The conformations of bottlebrush copolymers of PAA-PS were affected by thecompositions of binary solvents of water and DMF, as well as the architectures of the bottlebrush copolymers. Although the CG models were useful in studying these macromolecules, the atomistic details were lost in these models. To gain the atomistic information, we developed machine learning algorithms toconstructure all-atom models bybackmappingtheir CG models. Thereconstructedall-atom modelswere more accuratethanthose by usingthe algorithm of randomly fragment placement. My current research interests are CG modelling ofbiocondensates which can play pivotal roles in the formations ofmembranelessorganelles.We aim to unveil the roles of amino acid sequences in determining the properties of thebiocondensates. Overall, these computational studiescould help understand the chemical and biological phenomena at microscopic level and further provide guidelines for material designwhen integrated with machine learning algorithms.