You-Yeon Won
Purdue University, IN·Materials Science
Healthy lungs stay open because a thin film of surfactant coats the air-liquid interface inside each air sac and lowers surface tension. In acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening condition affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans a year, that film stops working, breathing becomes difficult, and oxygen cannot get into the blood.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
lung surfactant
acute respiratory distress syndrome
block copolymer micelles
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Determine how micelle shape controls interfacial mechanics by comparing spherical and cylindrical poly(styrene)-poly(ethylene glycol) micelles spread at the air-water interface, using Langmuir isotherms, X-ray reflectivity, grazing-incidence X-ray scattering, and Brewster angle microscopy.
- Test how the architecture of the micelle's outer polymer shell shapes interfacial adsorption and film stability by comparing linear and looped polymer brushes and developing mixed-brush micelles.
- Establish how block molecular weights, core size, and grafting density set micelle core rigidity, measuring glass transition behavior with nuclear magnetic resonance, fluorescence methods, and temperature-dependent interfacial analysis.
- Build structure-property relationships linking micelle nanostructure to surface pressure generation, compressibility, and stability, to provide a predictive basis for designing polymer-based lung surfactant replacements.
More about the research
Replacement surfactants made from lipids exist, but in badly injured lungs proteins and enzymes break them down, so severe cases are left with supportive care only. This project pursues a synthetic alternative and, to design it rationally, works out the physics of how nanoscale polymer particles spread and behave at an air-water interface.
Why it matters
Acute respiratory distress syndrome affects hundreds of thousands of U.S. patients and millions worldwide, and current lipid-based replacement surfactants are inactivated by proteins and enzymes in injured lungs. Understanding how polymer micelle shape, shell architecture, and core rigidity control behavior at the air-water interface could guide design of synthetic surfactants that keep working under those conditions, while also advancing basic knowledge of interfacial mechanics in materials science.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ryan Van Horn
Lafayette College, PA·Materials Science
Determine how drug molecules of differing water-repellence change crystal size and crystallinity of the PEO and PCL blocks in PEO-b-PCL films, using spectroscopic and thermal analysis.
Khanh-Hoa Tran-Ba
Towson University, MD·Chemistry
Quantify local diffusion of fluorescent probe beads in an unentangled, semi-dilute poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) solution by varying bead size and PEG concentration, using single-particle tracking on a fluorescence microscope.
Joe Patterson
University of California-Irvine, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Make a library of multiphase amphiphilic block copolymers and map how their phase behavior depends on polymer structure and solution conditions, using electron microscopy, optical microscopy and X-ray scattering.
The school
Purdue University: 43 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 833 research doctorates a year.
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