AEM Professor Richard James gives Penrose Lecture

AEM Professor Richard James recently delivered the Penrose Lecture at the McNamara Alumni Center on the subject of the structure of viruses. James is the department's Russell J. Penrose Professor, a chair in AEM endowed by Russell Penrose, and a Distinguished McKnight Professor.
James discussed what he calls “objective structures,” structures like carbon nanotubes, buckyballs and viral capsids that occur frequently in organic and inorganic materials. James has given a precise definition of these structures and has developed a methodology to compute all of them. This could lead to the discovery of new nanostructures with unusual collective properties.
“When you look at the calculations of the properties of these structures, you see these are the natural structures where you should find magnetic, ferroelectric and other collective properties,” he said.
In addition to the possibility of these interesting properties, objective structures also are unusually prevalent as the building blocks of viruses.
“That’s probably related to the fact that viruses do not have their own source of energy,” James said. “Therefore, they rely mostly on the process of ‘self-assembly’ to construct themselves. I think objective structures provide a kind of framework for the merging of materials science and biology.”
Mr. Penrose established the Russell J. Penrose Professorship in Aerospace Engineering in the 1980s; Prof. Daniel Joseph was its first recipient. Penrose, a philanthropist and University alumnus, also created an undergraduate scholarship and supported the 2000 construction of the Mechanical Engineering building.
The Penrose Lecture comes on the coattails of James’ return stateside from a one-year sabbatical. After being awarded the prestigious Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship by the German government, James worked at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, and traveled within Europe and beyond, including a 50 km cross-country ski in the mountains on the border between the Czech Republic and Poland on Easter Day.
Later, James traveled to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China, to visit his former postdoctoral fellow, Jian Li, who is now Chair of the Department of Materials Science at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Professor Li directs several important new programs in fuel cell technology in China.
“You can feel a tremendous energy in China, but also very significant growing pains,” he said. “From both an academic and societal perspective, I think it is desirable to forge stronger links between American and Chinese universities. The resources that are now going into science and technology in China are, like the Three Gorges Dam I visited, truly impressive.”

More on objective structures
When an engineer creates a new bridge design, reference tables are consulted. James seeks to create such a reference on a slightly smaller scale, that of atoms and molecules. He has long been interested in developing unusual new materials. Recently, his work has shifted toward biomaterials, specifically bacteriophage T4. Viruses like T4 are built of components that he calls “objective structures.” To picture an objective structure, imagine a group of identical people sitting in chairs that are arranged in a perfect circle. Each person sees exactly the same environment.
The idea of identical environment, beyond just in the case of viruses, James said, could prove helpful in designing new types of materials.
"People in biology take natural structures and study them: it is considered uninteresting in biology if one violates conditions that occur in vivo," he said. "But I like to think in more of an engineering way about this; and the first step is understanding how they’re put together - objective structures offer a special window into the building of molecular structures."
Understanding the structure of a virus should allow for the creation of molecules that would disable the virus, in theory. Such a technology could allow for the quick creation of carbon nanotubes, as well.
"You might be able to build a tubular structure whose molecules exactly match the inside of a carbon nanotube," James said. "Suitably functionalized, it could be a template for the large-scale growth of carbon nanotubes."