Research Interests
Prof. Iyer group is focused broadly on designing and fabricating functional material with controlled composition and architecture. Our consistent endeavour involves in synthesizing and exploring unique physical properties of novel advanced materials, and to exploiting these structures to design powerful new tools having application in organic electronics, chemical and biological sensors and brain therapeutics. Our group is divided into three main sub-groups with a rich and overlapping set of interests.
Organic Electronics
Our mission is to develop new π-conjugated organic molecules (oligomers and polymers) and study their structure and properties in detail. These materials would be utilized to fabricate devices for organic light emitting diodes, photovoltaic devices, thin film transistors and waveguides. NMR, IR, UV-Vis, Fluorimeter, cyclic voltammetry, X-ray, DSC, TGA and several microscopic techniques would be utilized to study the physical and chemical characteristics of these organic materials.
Sensors
Semiconducting polymers/oligomers and hybrid materials having conduction and/or luminescent properties would be utilized in photonic and electronics applications. Thin layer deposition, morphological studies, device fabrication and testing would be performed on all the new materials being developed within the group.
Brain Science
The research conducted in our group is geared toward elucidating the molecular mechanisms of neuron cell death occurring in neurodegenerative disease, with the aim of finding a cure for this diseases. To this end, our work mostly focus on Alzheimer’s disease, a particular neurodegenerative disorder mainly characterized by the formation amyloid fibrils in brain. Here we make various types of materials including nanoparticles, polymer, small molecules and try to inhibit amyloid beta fibrillation.