Academic Affiliation
Professor Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Credentials
PhD, 1986, University of Washington
Bio
Neal Woodbury, PhD, leads a team that seeks to develop molecular devices and nanoscale hybrid electronics for use in biomedicine, environmental remediation and monitoring, threat detection and agriculture. His research into the structure/function relationships in photosynthesis led him to realize the awesome potential of harnessing the energy of light to direct chemical reactions.
Looking at the diversity of nature, Dr. Woodbury clearly sees that there must be a molecular formula in the form of a heteropolymer sequence that has almost any desired function or property - a molecular cure for disease, a sensor for a toxin, and a complex molecular matrix for computing or display. One must simply use the right basis set of chemical monomers and search the sequence space until an answer is found. His efforts have been directed at building synthetic systems that can do this: speed up natural evolution.
Dr. Woodbury is an advocate of interdisciplinary science as a means of providing researchers greater vision in addressing real-world problems.Dr. Woodbury's body of published work includes more than 75 published articles and studies. He had been a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biophysics Panel for the past year; a current member of the NSF IGERT Panel; and an associate editor of Photochemistry and Photobiology. He has served as the Director of the Photosynthesis Center at ASU and is an active member of the American Chemical Society, Biophysical Society and American Photobiology Society.
Dr. Woodbury received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington.