Rebecca Schulman, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been appointed as the Kent Gordon Croft Investment Management Faculty Scholar.

This endowed faculty scholar was established in 2015 by alumnus L. Gordon Croft ’56 in honor of his son, Kent Gordon Croft.

With secondary appointments in chemistry and computer science, she is also a member of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology, the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, the Chemistry-Biology Interface Program, the Center for Cell Dynamics, and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics; and she is currently the co-director of the Passport to Future Technology Leadership program for PhD students.

Rebecca has developed new means of building and repairing molecular circuits using a technique called point-to-point assembly and has developed new classes of soft materials called “hydrogels” that can change form in response to specific biomolecular sequences (or codes), paving the way for new classes of biomedical devices, robots, and materials.

She and her research group develop intelligent and adaptive biomolecular materials and nanostructures by combining ideas from materials science, biochemistry, circuit design, soft matter physics, and cell-free synthetic biology. They also design molecular reaction systems (or chemical reaction networks) for regulating energy flow within materials and for sensing and responding to environmental signals.