David Lynn
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Chemistry
Bacteria that settle and grow on surfaces cause costly and persistent harm in hospitals and clinics, including on medical devices. Many coatings have been designed to resist this bacterial fouling, but all eventually fail in real-world use.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces
antifouling coatings
biofouling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Design drug-patterned 'proto-SLIPS', porous polymer coatings spotted with a water-soluble antibiotic and then infused with oil, that release the drug to reduce biofouling and bacterial load.
- Test how these antibiotic-patterned coatings release drug into water and then self-heal into uniformly slippery surfaces that strongly resist fouling by pathogenic bacteria.
- Develop proto-SLIPS that release synthetic anti-virulence agents, compounds that block bacterial communication, to weaken virulent behaviors of bacteria near the surface.
More about the research
One promising option is a slippery liquid-infused porous surface (SLIPS): a porous polymer coating soaked with oil so that bacteria cannot stick. SLIPS coatings are passive, though. They repel bacteria that touch them, but they cannot reduce the number of microbes nearby or blunt their harmful behavior.
Why it matters
Bacterial contamination of surfaces in healthcare settings carries heavy economic and human costs, and current antifouling materials fail in practice. Coatings that both repel bacteria and release antibiotics or anti-virulence agents could help prevent fouling or infection on and around interventional medical devices, benefiting patients who rely on them.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
T Randall Lee
University of Houston, TX·Chemistry
Design multidentate adsorbates that combine phase-incompatible or structurally dissimilar parts, and test whether they form stable, evenly mixed films that could serve as nanoscale anti-fouling coatings.
Mariana Lopes
University of Massachusetts, MA·Engineering·Early-career
Quantify how UV dose and exposure time change bacterial attachment, extracellular polymeric substance release, motility and inactivation, using UV-emitting glass in microfluidic flow cells with phase-contrast microscopy.
Qian Chen
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Materials Science
Identify the surface forces that cause ligand molecules to form patches in specific regions of nanoparticles. The goal is to learn how to break particle symmetry and create directional interactions, combining theory, simulation and experiments.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.