Andrea Tao

Talk Title: Colloidal self-assembly, from nanocrystals to functional material

Andrea R. Tao is a Professor and the Vice Chair of Education in the Nano and Chemical Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. She earned her A.B. in Chemistry and Physics in 2002 from Harvard University, where she worked with George Whitesides on microscale self-assembly.

She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2007 at UC Berkeley working with Peidong Yang, where she developed the Langmuir-Blodgett technique for metal nanocrystal assembly. Prior to joining UC San Diego, she served as a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Barbara with Daniel Morse in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Department investigating the unique assembly properties of squid proteins.

Andrea currently serves as the Deputy Director of the San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure, the co-Director of the Institute for Materials Discovery and Design, and Associate Editor of Materials Chemistry Frontiers. She also co-leads an Interdisciplinary Research Group (on Predictive Self-Assembly) and serves on the leadership team for the NSF-funded UC San Diego Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, which began in 2020. Her group’s research interests lie in the discovery and development of new nanomaterials for plasmonics, where light is propagated, manipulated, and confined by nanocomponents that are smaller than the wavelength of light itself.