Kathrine

Thank you for joining me today. To start, would you mind introducing yourself, your fields, and the main question your work focuses on?

Professor Love

So I'm Brian Love. I work at the University of Michigan. I'm a faculty member in both the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science.

We also have a program called Macromolecular Science and Engineering, which I'm also a part of. I work basically on the soft side of the Materials Science and Engineering program here. We work on polymers and the notion of making longer chain kinds of organic structures.

And then more recently, we've been spending a lot of time, given the fact that most polymer programs are very focused on how do you make polymers, we're kind of focused on the back end in terms of trying to understand how we might be able to leverage nature in terms of being able to produce polymers that ultimately can degrade and form other kinds of structures or be able to be reused in some way as well.

Kathrine

Cool. So what first made you interested in studying Materials Science and Engineering?

Professor Love

Well, I'm not sure I ever did study. Actually, I take that back. I did study at the graduate level, but at the undergraduate level, I probably didn't know what Materials Science was.

I was a chemistry major, and I took a lot of classes in chemical engineering and math. So I was sort of already in kind of the synthesis areas in terms of making products. I found that I was more interested in kind of solid phase structures and sort of the built economy and less in terms of like, you know, production synthesis and that sort of thing.

And so I found areas that were more of interest in terms of things that we would be doing in terms of looking at changes in material based on some kinds of exposures and all of this from a solid phase standpoint. And a lot of Materials Science is very focused at the solid phase.

Kathrine

So as you mentioned, you hold positions in both Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering. So how do those two fields approach problems differently, and how do they overlap in your research?

Professor Love

Well, we are organic. Collagen, hyaluronic acid, other kinds of, you know, any kind of cell that's involved in protein synthesis is essentially producing polymers. And so there's a large overlap between the physiology from a cellular basis, making use of cellular based reactors and the outcomes of those products, which are usually natural tissue in one form or another.

Nature has a way of being able to produce polymers that is very exquisite, but it's very different in terms of synthesis modes. We might polymerize one monomer in a controlled way using elevated temperature and pressures and be able to sort of manipulate the structure. But we're pretty crude in our ability to make those things.

You compare that with nature, starting with 23 or 24 different amino acids as building blocks and can literally stitch a polymer together monomer by monomer to be able to make some kind of controlled architecture. And because of messenger RNA and DNA templating, that cell will continue to make the same thing over and over again without necessarily any changes in the structure, unless the cell undergoes some kind of change as well.

Kathrine

So in addition, you also authored biomaterials, a systems approach to engineering concepts. So what does taking a systems approach to biomaterials mean?

Professor Love

Okay, well, if you think about, I mean, rather than being kind of a zoologist, there's a lot of emphasis in biomaterials on sort of approved products, things that have been already kind of generally approved based on the Food and Drug Administration or other kinds of criteria. They've been sort of either grandfathered or accepted as products that are both safe and effective in some way. But if you look at orthopedics, for example, you know, I mean, most bone implants of one form or another are based on really a very small number of material kinds of choices.

And it would be nice to sort of understand what the general requirements are and think about how there's kind of like open spaces where we don't have the ideal kinds of materials that are actually available, but there are developmental kinds of efforts that are going on to be able to sort of fill in the gaps. And, you know, we're trying to sort of highlight areas where there are kind of open questions that still haven't really been addressed rather than providing this history lesson where these are accepted materials and anything that isn't in this list is not accepted and probably will take forever to get installed. It's rather better to sort of think about, well, what are the design requirements we're really looking for?

What are the products that, you know, could be developed that could satisfy those kinds of requirements without necessarily having the biases on what's already approved?

Kathrine

Yeah. And speaking of problems, could you walk us through one biomaterials project or problem that you've worked on, including the research question methods and conclusion?

Professor Love

Sure. So we do a lot of work tied to the School of Dentistry. We work on bonding and adhesives and other kinds of forms that are used to be able to sort of be involved in orthodontics and other kinds of restorative dentistry in one form or another, bridges, other kinds of components where there's some kind of attachment that's going on to tooth kind of structures.

And we've been interested in the materials that allow us to be able to do bonding and debonding in an effective kind of way. Orthodontics is one of these things where you would like permanent kind of attachment until you decide that the orthodontic treatment is completed and you would like to be able to remove all that hardware that is installed in you. So the question is, you know, under what conditions are, you know, the products that are used ideally suited for being able to perform their function and then still be able to be removed in some kind of effective way?

We've been, you know, from years past, we were involved in a project very closely looking at how to manipulate the characteristics of adhesives that were being used to bond so-called ceramic brackets. And these ceramic brackets are nice in a way because they, you know, they can be transparent, they can be kind of tooth colored. And so the process of making those structures makes it more aesthetically pleasing for somebody undergoing the treatment.

And, you know, if it turns out we're trying to sort of expand the scope of who can be treated people who are older are not necessarily so excited about having a mouthful of metal, you know, that sort of thing. So we're looking, we've been looking at how to manipulate, I guess if you take a ceramic kind of structure though, you bond it to a, basically a mineralized tissue like tooth and you're at the point where the procedure is completed. Then the question is, well, how do you remove this thing?

And there are all kinds of like torquing devices and de-bonding kinds of instruments. You may have gone through this yourself. I don't know, but the process of removing those structures for metal-based components, there's a kind of a, an effort of just peeling back the structure and it works pretty easily, but ceramic brackets don't peel, they could fracture.

And so, you know, inevitably there's some sort of like catastrophic failure that occurs somewhere in the interface. And ideally we would like to be able to avoid that happening within your tooth itself, because if it turns out your tooth doesn't have sufficient cohesive density or cohesive energy, then you find out that, you know, in the process of removing the bracket, you've also removed some fraction of the tooth and that's a very undesirable kind of thing. So we are trying to sort of think about how do you manipulate the adhesive to still be functional, performing its overall bonding function to hold these brackets kind of in place, but at the same time, lowering the overall level of adhesion in such a way that you can design failure into the adhesive itself rather than relying on a more circuitous kind of pathway for de-bonding.

Kathrine

Yeah, that's a great example. And I, yeah, as you mentioned, I did undergo an orthodontic treatment and I'm guessing this wasn't the goal of your current research, but I think when they removed my braces, they basically used to drill to like drill off the glue that was on the teeth. So pretty stuck there.

Professor Love

Right. Well, you know, that would be, yeah, nice to also, you know, avoid ingesting it at the same time at the end. So, yeah, right.

Kathrine

Yeah. So how do the topics of sustainability and suspensions appear in your research and why are those important?

Professor Love

Okay, well, I'll deal with suspensions kind of first. So we are involved in a lot of efforts where there are, I guess, polymers that are dispersed in other kinds of media. If you think about microplastics sort of exposure that's occurring collectively in our environment, there are airborne microparticulates, there are polymers that degrade basically in aqueous environments that form smaller and smaller sorts of species and, you know, either they sink or they float to the top or they can be suspended in these kinds of liquids as well.

If you have really small dust particles and sort of, you know, have the light, have your sunlight at the right sort of process, you can actually see all these particulates that are in your, you know, sort of field of view, if you look carefully enough and you find out that all these little particles are kind of suspended in air and similar kind of issues that happen with regard to microplastic sorts of species as well if they're small enough.

And so we've been interested in just trying to sort of characterize sedimentation and the rates at which things fall out of solution and what are the issues related to colloidal stability of particles and dispersions as they might be found in two phase kinds of mixtures. So particles in air, those are solid phase particles in a gaseous kind of environment. We think about, you know, aquatic sort of systems, dispersions can be made where particles are dispersed in water and there's a lot of efforts regarding, you know, wastewater treatment that are tied to clarification and, you know, all of that is sedimentation based as well in a large number of ways and also precipitation based.

And so, you know, that's an example of kind of where, you know, I just find it interesting that physics is cool and there's a lot of, you know, sort of practical sorts of applications where it's really important. Our overall issue in, our overall effort in sustainability is kind of linked with what I mentioned at the beginning. You know, we're very good at application specialization.

You know, we sort of are very good at being able to sort of design products, polymer-based products that can satisfy a series of general kinds of design requirements. And, you know, those particular components have to survive for a certain period of time, whether it's in a car or it's on a plane or whether it's on your, you know, your equivalent smartphone, you know, all of these components are kind of there and they last a certain amount of time or the component lasts a certain amount of time and then it's time to get rid of it and upgrade or do something else associated with what you're doing. There's a big level of loss where these products sort of just get discarded and lost and there's a new upgrade but many of the components aren't necessarily recycled very effectively and so we're sort of trying to sort of think more carefully about designing things at the beginning phases so that they're easier to recycle at the end. There's a lot of like little tweaks that we do in polymers to be able to make them colorized or to make them look a little better or to make them glossier or to make them have other kinds of attributes or features that are better than the last one we had and all of those little tweaks tend to make everything unrecyclable and so it would be nice to sort of go back and think about what is the overall level of design requirement and how do we make products kind of simpler in such a way to be able to avoid having so many products that are essentially unrecyclable.

Kathrine

So what does a typical day in your life look like and how is your time divided amongst research, teaching, writing, and other responsibilities?

Professor Love

We teach several classes per year and those are sort of lecture recitation sorts of classes or lab-based classes. We meet several times a week. I would say in terms of preparation for class, grading, all the other kinds of assessments that go on with regard to interfacing with students, I'd say about between a third and half my time is probably dedicated to sort of involved in the educational process in some form or another.

We're doing research and that involves writing proposals, writing research manuscripts, mentoring students, which is actually a component of education as well, trying to sort of gauge progress and to suggest ideas for how to advance the research in one form or another. I'd say that's probably another half-time sort of commitment as well. We're obviously normally working more than 40 hours per week and so usually the rest of the time that is committed is tied to administrative responsibilities and that's probably another 25% kind of commitment in terms of things that we're doing.

So we're over-committed, everybody is.

Kathrine

It definitely sounds like a very, very, very busy schedule. So next, what do students most often misunderstand about material science, biomaterials, or engineering research in your experience?

Professor Love

I'd have to think. I think it's interesting to think about the evolution of education for engineering in general. We never seem to take anything out of the curriculum, but we keep adding more and more things, ethics training, an understanding of the engineering economy.

We have team-based building projects. You have to show leadership in one form or another. All these kind of other features are things that are still required and there are certain things that have been liberating.

We don't have to integrate by hand anymore. We can make use of tools that simplify some of the process and database analysis and the ability to sort of analyze what-ifs on problems using things like databases and everything are actually quite useful. But I do find that it's hard to sort of provide all of the depth that I had in terms of my understanding, going from hand integration to understanding physically what you're doing.

I think there's a loss that happens when people understand the more sophisticated tools, but haven't necessarily thought about how difficult it was to begin with. There's a tactile sense that I think I have that may not necessarily be easy to translate to other people who are much younger and are fully immersed in the electronic economy.

Kathrine

Absolutely. You're a professor at the University of Michigan, which is an extremely prestigious college. Is there anything that you think students should know before applying to perhaps UMichigan or colleges in general?

Professor Love

I have a young son who just got through the interviewing process associated with getting into college himself. I found that shepherding him through the process, the world has changed. It's not necessarily how I went through my process of looking for schools and deciding where to go for my own education was quite different than the experience that he had at this point.

I think good grades are important. Having some kind of broader kinds of exposure, whether that be working at a job or doing some experience that has a value added component to it. I don't think people have to be building suspension bridges in their backyard to be able to show ingenuity or to somehow have some larger cache in terms of the application pool.

I think the personal statement has varied in its impact on people. There are efforts where people are hiring out other people to help them prepare their personal statement. I just think it should be authentic and should be representative of what you're doing.

There's no expectation on our behalf that you should be further advanced than you really are. Give yourself some grace. I think it's okay to stand up and say I don't know something up front or I'm willing to learn.

I'm only starting out in this whole realm. I think that's okay. I will also say that I'm not on the review committee with regard to undergraduate applications.

I have no idea how they actually go through the analysis and end up with x numbers of thousands of applicants and then an entering cohort of students that are obviously smaller than that.

Kathrine

Yeah, absolutely. Finally, what is one realistic step a high school student could take to begin exploring material science or biomaterials?

Professor Love

Well, I think just observing the built economy is really important. I mean, you can find evidence of material science everywhere. I think that it's your material science and engineering everywhere.

Just the notion of how something is produced, whether it be a cast iron engine block, whether it be things that are in your room at home, things that are not necessarily – even components of natural products also have sort of material science sort of qualities in terms of mechanics and the structural features associated with how wood is developed and all of this. There are important sorts of things where – important sorts of things you can just be exposed to by just opening your eyes and looking around. So many people have their eyes in their phone at this point.

They're not looking around as much as they could be. There's a lot of evidence where things are being built in a specific kind of way. If you can think about how to be a producer or a creator, not just in terms of e-content, but more in terms of physical features associated with how things are built, that's a really important piece associated with material science.

Kathrine

Absolutely. That is a wonderful note to end on. Thank you so much for sharing your work and your advice with me.

I've really enjoyed listening to what you've had to share, and I think students will definitely learn a lot from hearing your perspective.

Professor Love

Very good. Thank you.