June 15, 2014 – June 20, 2014

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Location

Lucca, Italy

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Organizers
Stefan Zauscher, Duke University
Atul N Parikh, University of California, Davis

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Overview

The GRC on Biointerface Science is dedicated to promoting in-depth discussions and the unencumbered exchange of ideas in all fundamental and applied aspects of the most recent advances concerned with natural and engineered interfaces involving biomolecules and their assemblies. This biennial GRC provides a premier venue for presentation and discussion of research at the frontier of this rapidly developing, interdisciplinary field, toward building a common language, identify outstanding interdisciplinary challenges, and stimulate new directions for research and collaboration. The vision of the Biointerface Science GRC, as articulated by the chairs of the inaugural conference and maintained by the current applicant, is to bring together recent advances in materials science and molecular biology with sophisticated surface and interface analysis methods to develop experimental tools and theoretical models to describe biointerface phenomena with physical concepts and rules that allow predictive, model-driven research, similar to the interfacial understanding that has been successfully developed for semiconductor and catalytic processes. A second, and equally important objective is to accelerate the rate at which new development in biomolecular design and engineering are brought into the domain of physical scientists, and conversely to educate biologists of the precision techniques that are now available to position, manipulate, and interrogate biomolecules at length scales from the single molecule upwards in two-and three dimensions. Together, this intellectual interplay will lead to a new paradigm in the way in which molecules are designed, studied, and exploited for the vast number of biotechnology applications in which “biomolecules meet surfaces