MSE Talk: Stacy Copp

Speaker: Dr. Stacy Copp, UC Irvine

Title: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Atomically Precise, DNA-stabilized Nanoclusters

Abstract: DNA is a programmable building block for sequence-encoded materials that are governed by Nature’s base pairing rules. Metal-nucleic acid chemistry offers the potential to significantly expand beyond what Nature offers, but the “sequence-structure-property” relationships of such materials are often poorly understood. This talk focuses on a data-driven approach to this challenge. We are harnessing high-throughput experimentation together with machine learning to guide the discovery of a new class of DNA-based materials with promise for bioimaging applications: atomically precise and programmable DNA-templated silver nanoclusters (AgN-DNAs) with bright fluorescence. AgN-DNAs have diverse sequence-selected photoluminescence properties, but the sequence-structure-property relationships of AgN-DNAs have remained elusive. By combining high-throughput experiments and machine learning models with analytical studies of single nanocluster species, we learn how nucleobase sequence selects the structures and colors of AgN-DNAs. This approach enables the design of new DNA template sequences for AgN-DNAs that emit light in the near-infrared tissue transparency window, a key area of need for biomedical imaging.

Bio: Stacy Copp is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. She received a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Physics from UC Santa Barbara. She was then a Hoffman Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow and L'Oreal USA for Women in Science Fellows at Los Alamos National Laboratory, before joining UC Irvine in 2019. At UC Irvine, she leads the Molecular Nanomaterials Lab, whose mission is to harness DNA and synthetic block polymers as programmable building blocks for nanoscale materials. Copp has pioneered machine learning approaches to DNA nanomaterials design, including the discovery of DNA-templated silver nanoclusters with sequence-selected atomic sizes and fluorescence colors. Her research has been recognized by recent awards such as the Scialog Fellowship, Hellman Faculty Fellowship, and AFOSR Young Investigator Award.