Organic glasses are widely used in applications ranging from pharmacology to organic electronics. The light in modern cell-phone displays is emitted by organic light emitting diodes. These light emitting diodes consist of stacks of organic semiconductor glasses. The organization of molecules in organic semiconductor glasses determines the quantum efficiency of organic electroluminescent devices. Read more about how researchers around the world, including myself, are engineering glasses at the molecular level to optimize their function for organic electronic applications here.

Liquid crystals are materials that combine the fluidity of liquids with the structural anisotropy of crystals. Some chiral liquid crystals exhibit structural features so large that they reflect light in the visible range, a property known as photonic crystallinity. These photonic liquid crystals exhibit properties that make them of interest for applications ranging from sensing to lasing. However, for spatially uniform optical properties photonic liquid crystals need to be organized over macroscopic length-scales. Read more about controlling the structure and properties of photonic liquid crystals here.

Low aqueous solubility of drug molecules is one of the greatest challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry today. As glasses are more soluble than their crystalline counterpart, a common strategy to increase bioavailability is to prepare the active pharmaceutical ingredient in its glassy state. However, glasses are metastable states of matter and tend to crystallize which negates the advantages of using them in the first place. You can read more about a strategy I have developed to engineer resistance to crystallization in molecular glasses here.