Ali Miserez

Ali Miserez is a Faculty member in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) with a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering (2003) and a specialization in advanced metal/ceramic composites and mechanics of materials. In 2004, he received a Swiss National Science Foundation post-doc fellowship and moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he was affiliated with the Materials Department and the Marine Science Institute. At UCSB, he expanded his research interest towards biological materials and biomimetics working in the group of Prof. Herb Waite. In 2009, he moved to NTU as an Assistant Professor, and in 2011 he was awarded the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellowship, a $3 Million individual research grant for early career scientists.

Dr. Miserez’s research is centered on revealing the molecular, physico-chemical, and structural principles from unique biological materials, and on translating these designs into novel biomimetic synthesis strategies. His research group is strongly cross-disciplinary, with molecular biologists, chemists, bio-physicists, and materials scientists combining their expertise towards bioinspired engineering from various angles, including protein biochemistry, extra-cellular tissue transcriptomic, polymer chemistry, biomimetic peptide design, biophysics, and nanomechanics. In recent years, his work has appeared in both general (Science, Nature Materials, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, Advanced Materials) and specialized journals (Biomacromolecules, ACS Nano, JBC, Polymer Chemistry, etc, ). He has delivered numerous invited talks, including at various Gordon Research Conferences in the field of bioinspired materials and biomineralization.

Research Interests

• Structural properties of biological materials from the macro-scale to the nano-scale
• Multi-scale structural and mechanical properties of biological materials, including biominerals.
• Elastomeric and structural properties of bioelastomers
• Protein chemistry of sclerotized hard-tissues from marine organisms, such as Cephalopod
• Single-molecular force spectroscopy of structural and elastic proteins
• Underwater adhesion mechanisms of adhesive proteins
• Biofouling
• RNA-sequencing and proteomics of extra-cellular biological materials
• Advanced Metal/Ceramic composites
• Experimental Fracture Mechanics

Companies

• Full Professor Nanyang Technological University (2021)
• Associate Professor Nanyang Technological University - Singapore (2016 — 2021)
• Assistant Professor Nanyang Technological University (2009 — 2016)
• Research Scientist University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) (2004 — 2009)

Education

• M.Sc, PhD EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) (1993 — 2003)
• Master/exchange program Northwestern University (1997 — 1998)