Absolutely. The combinatorial method, applied in an appropriate manner, can reduce by an order of magnitude or more the time and cost of developing a new material. This is of interest to a broad range of chemical companies that manufacture plastics, as well as to scientists who need to have an efficient method for "mapping" the response of a certain material to large numbers of variables.

In layman’s terms, this work profiles the very first successful demonstrations of a new technique for performing research and developing new materials. The applications are boundless and include medical devices, engineered tissues, fuel cells, and other environmental materials, and new ways to process and package electronics. The methods, called "combinatorial methods" allow about 1,000 tests to be performed in the time that it used to take for one test. The ability to quickly identify materials that do, or do not, work for an application is ever more important for industries where the time to get the product to market often governs who will be the industry leader.

Although I am now a professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, the work really began during my post doc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the direction of Eric Amis. The idea for combinatorial polymer science came out of discussions centering on the extremely large number of parameters one can vary in polymers and the relative inability of conventional "detailed" techniques to handle this breadth. At the time that we began, there were no standardized or accepted methods or instruments commercially available to make polymer combinatorial libraries. So we had to start from scratch and develop novel techniques ourselves. This effort has continued to grow stronger since I have moved to Georgia Tech.