WELCOME TO THE
HENDERSON RESEARCH GROUP
Functional Polymers and Organic Nanotechnology Lab
Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
University of South Florida
Welcome to the homepage for Professor Clifford L. Henderson's research group in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of South Florida. Our research focus broadly lies at the intersection of chemical engineering, chemistry, and materials science, where in many cases the general goals of our work are: (1) to understand the connections between chemical structure, material processing, and properties in advanced materials, (2) to develop materials and processes that allow for high definition patterning of materials and formation of nanostructured materials that ehance their function, and (3) to use these materials and processes to fabricate novel devices and structures for a variety of applications.
Our work leads to projects that intersect a variety of topics including polymer science, thin film science and technology, organic chemistry, nanoscience & nanotechnology, nanomanufacturing, molecular modeling and molecular dynamics, and electronic and optical materials and devices. The materials and processes developed through our work are applied towards the fabrication of a wide variety of things including: structured materials (e.g. microphase separated block copolymers), silicon and graphene based electronic devices, and polymeric scaffolds for tissue engineering. In virtually all of our work we address our problems through a combination of detailed experimental and modeling/simulation approaches.
Examples of current projects include: (1) design of new block copolymers and processes for the directed self assembly (DSA) and fabrication of nanostructures, (2) modeling and simulation of block copolymer phase separation using advanced and novel molecular dynamics techniques, (3) design of new photoresist materials and processes for sub-20nm patterning, (4) studies of the physicochemical property behavior of polymer ultra-thin films, and (5) directed synthesis of graphene. We invite you to explore our work further.
Figure 1: Example of negative tone molecular resist designed by our group and the 15 nm line-space structures formed for integrated circuit fabrication through EUV exposure of this material.
Figure 2: Schematic of how we are trying to better engineer Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) systems to capture sunlight more efficiently by using block copolymers to produce ordered materials with feature length scales commensurate with exciton charge pair separation distances.