EPSRC New Investigator Award to CNIE lecturer Diego Lopez Barreiro

We are thrilled to announce that the project “A toolbox to predict the mechanical and structural properties of new protein biopolymer” has stated this month at the Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering. This grant was awarded to Dr. Diego Lopez Barreiro via an EPSRC New Investigator Award. This grant will support the establishment of his research activities at the Manufacturing Futures Lab in the UCL East campus for the next 2.5 years. The project also involves a collaboration with the Shaping Matter Lab from Prof. Kunal Masania at the TU Delft (The Netherlands).

Most everyday plastic materials are made of polymers produced from petroleum. The growing global market for polymers also generates a vast amount of waste. This challenges our ability to meet the demands for polymeric materials while minimising waste production. There is therefore an urgent unmet need for new circular and sustainable polymers that fulfil the current role of plastics, while allowing the UK to meet the targets set in the Net Zero Strategy.

To that end, Nature is a great source of inspiration: it uses biopolymers to self-assemble structural materials for a wide range of mechanical and structural requirements. Specifically, structural proteins (e.g., elastin, collagen, keratin, or silk) are a very appealing class of biopolymers due to their sustainability, lightweight, stimuli responsiveness, easy processability, degradability, and tuneable structural or mechanical properties. Furthermore, thanks to our ability to engineer biology, we can use recombinant DNA technology to create new nature-inspired structural proteins that fuse in a single biopolymer the properties of multiple structural and/or functional natural proteins.

However, to date protein-based materials are mainly researched using low-throughput trial-and-error experimentation, which impedes rapid development and prototyping. At the intersection between computation, materials, biotechnology, and bioprocess engineering, this project will develop a predictive toolbox that uses computational modelling to accelerate design-build-test-learn cycles for protein-based biopolymers that replace fossil-derived polymers.

We congratulate Diego on this grant and look forward to the exciting science that will emerge from this project!