Nanotechnology has received widespread attention in the last several decades due to the technological breakthroughs it has enabled across sectors from electronics to medicine. There are already numerous commercial products in everyday life containing nano-sized objects. "Smart" materials change one or more of their properties in response to external stimuli, such as light, and represent a step toward increasing the complexity and therefore, functionality of nanomaterials. The ITN will push research into applications at the cutting-edge of nanotechnology by uniting leading experts from both the academic and non-academic sectors under the theme “Multi-Stimuli Responsive Molecular Systems and Materials.”
The objective of the research programme is to prepare new “smart” molecular systems and materials in a bottom-up approach from low molecular weight building blocks by exploiting dynamic covalent chemistry and supramolecular interactions. This approach is an attractive methodology for the construction of complex nanostructures and materials as it combines the advantages of covalent synthesis (robustness of the bonds) with those of non-covalent synthesis (error correction, responsiveness) without any of the disadvantages (lability in the case of non-covalent chemistry and synthetic difficulty in accessing large structures through traditional covalent synthesis).