The Department of Materials Science and Engineering is delighted to announce the addition of Dr. Ting Xu as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Xu currently holds a joint postdoctoral appointment in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and the Cold Neutrons for Biology and Technology (CNBT) Partnership Program at NIST. Dr. Xu’s current research focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization of de novo designed peptides (artificial proteins) that will serve building blocks for functional biomaterials or be incorporated into block copolymer based nanoporous thin films. Dr. Xu’s earlier Ph.D. research, under the guidance of Professor Thomas P. Russell in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, centered on controlling the nanostructure in diblock copolymer thin films using external fields (e.g electric, surface, shear and solvent fields). Dr. Xu will join the MSE faculty on a full-time basis in January 2007. Her future research interests are to fundamentally understand the hierarchical self-assembly of complex systems involving artificial proteins, block copolymers and nanoparticles and apply it toward generating functional materials exhibiting novel electronic, photonic and biological properties.