Dr Kate McGrath

Associated Academic Staff

School of Chemical and Physical Sciences
Victoria University, PO Box 600,
Wellington
New Zealand

Phone: +64-4-463 5963
Fax: +64-4-463 5237
Email: Kathryn.McGrath@vuw.ac.nz

Projects and Areas of interest

Throughout Nature and manmade materials it is possible to find specific patterns in both fluid and solid systems that concur, covering an enormous range of length scales from the subnanometre on up. For a subset of these materials, and at least to a certain extent, such patterning is manipulated and controlled via molecular self-assembly.

I am particularly interested in understanding the fundamental aspects of self-assembly and how they can be utilised to control hierarchical patterning and thereby the macroscopic physicochemical properties of fluid and solid materials. To this end, work in my group is focussed on three main classes of materials; the thermodynamically stable lyotropic liquid crystals, the kinetically stabilised emulsion colloidal system and the biomineral calcium carbonate, the nucleation and growth of which is manipulated by both kinetics and thermodynamics. For the latter we investigate biomineralisation in natural systems, specifically the formation of the exoskeleton of sea urchins, in addition to the nucleation and growth mechanisms involved in calcium carbonate precipitation from much simpler model systems where we focus on understanding the roles of, for example, molecular interactions, spatial confinement and soft templation.

To facilitate such investigations we use techniques such as NMR, EM, AFM, SAXS and XRD, optical spectroscopy, rheology and light scattering which when combined together allow us to probed different length and time scales in our systems.