Department News

Chemistry Welcomes New Faculty Member, Dr. Benjamin E. Partridge

April 21, 2022

partridge_benjamin_web.jpgBenjamin E. Partridge will officially join the UR Department of Chemistry as of July 1, 2022, as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Levinson-Shapiro Faculty Scholar.

Dr. Partridge received an undergraduate master’s (MChem) from the University of Oxford in 2013, completing his thesis project in the group of Prof. Paul D. Beer on the topic of halogen-bonding rotaxanes, for which he received the Inorganic Part II Thesis Prize (Proxime Accesserunt). Dr. Partridge then moved from his native UK to join the lab of Prof. Virgil Percec at the University of Pennsylvania as a Thouron Fellow, where he studied the supramolecular polymerization of self-assembling dendrons and was awarded with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) International Student Research Fellowship. In 2019, Dr. Partridge began postdoctoral work at Northwestern University, developing new methods to program protein assembly using DNA in the group of Prof. Chad A. Mirkin as an International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) Fellow. In 2021, Dr. Partridge was recognized with the IIN Outstanding Researcher Award. We are thrilled to have Dr. Partridge join Rochester and the Department of Chemistry soon.

The Partridge group will be pursuing advances in the area of supramolecular bioinspired chemistry, seeking to build synthetic materials with lifelike functions. Specific systems of interest include synthetic chaperones to address protein aggregation, hierarchical architectures to mimic cellular networks, and dissipative chemical structures to control protein assembly. Group members will work at the interface of organic, biological, and materials chemistry, with particular emphasis placed on developing expertise in both synthesis and structural analysis.

 


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