Bin Li to give talk in Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar Series Bin Li to give talk in Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar Series

Bin Li, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, will give a talk as part of the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar Series from 11 a.m.-noon Monday, Nov. 27, in 208 Hubbard Hall. The talk is titled "Soy Protein as Functional Materials."

Transforming renewable and inexpensive biomass to functional materials has been a growing global trend. Such transformation will not only increase the add-on values of the economic crops, but also meet the increasing demand for environmentally-benign materials systems associated with various industrial sectors. Besides the renewability and abundance in nature, the biomass possesses unique chemical and physical structures suggesting great potential in non-food functional applications. Plant proteins such as soy protein and zein protein, etc., have complex multilevel structures that not only are essential to nutritional and biological functions, but also create great opportunities in new generation biomaterials.