PIPages
Labs

Gil Gallegos

New Mexico Highlands University, NM·Materials Science

Many useful materials, from biosensors to drug carriers, are built by combining organic (carbon-based) and inorganic building blocks. Mixing two or more kinds of components in one material lets researchers tune its structure, optical, electronic and magnetic properties.

Fields

Materials Science

Chemistry

Computer Science

Topics

materials science

hybrid materials

organic-inorganic materials

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2027

What they work on

  1. Combine machine learning with synthetic chemistry so that predictions guide which bioinspired organic–inorganic hybrid materials to make and lab results improve the next round of design.
  2. Use high-throughput automated chemistry and biosynthesis to make small molecules, organic polymers and organic–inorganic porous materials with two or more components.
  3. Tune the structural, optical, electronic and magnetic properties of multi-component materials for use as biosensors, drug delivery systems, chiral chromatography media and polymerization templates.

More about the research

But the number of possible combinations is far too large to test one by one. This project pairs machine learning with synthetic chemistry so that computer predictions guide which materials to make and lab results feed back into the next round of design, an approach the grant calls closing the design loop.

Why it matters

Machine-learning-guided design of hybrid organic–inorganic materials could speed the discovery of materials for biosensors, drug delivery, separating mirror-image drug molecules and polymer manufacturing. The partnership also builds materials research capacity at a Hispanic-serving university in northern New Mexico.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

NMHU-BioPACIFIC MIP collaboration in design, synthesis and applications of metal-organic hybrid biomaterials

NSF · Jul 2021 – Jun 2027

Closest labs

Hanwei Gao

Florida State University, FL·Materials Science

Design and synthesize chiral, noncentrosymmetric (lacking inversion symmetry) two-dimensional hybrid metal halides, layered organic-inorganic semiconductors, as a platform for studying nonreciprocal transport.

James Bour

Wayne State University, MI·Chemistry·Early-career

Develop colloidal suspensions of normally insoluble inorganic reagents so automated liquid handlers can dispense them, and benchmark them in cross-coupling reactions including cross-electrophile couplings.

Qiang Zhang

Washington State University, WA·Chemistry

Test whether neutron absorption can transmute vanadium atoms inside vanadium metal-organic frameworks into chromium, creating mixed-metal frameworks that conventional synthesis cannot readily produce.

The school

New Mexico Highlands University: 1 labs on PI Pages, $4M a year on research.

More about New Mexico Highlands University

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