Research Interests

1. Crystallization

1.1 Freeze-Casting / Ice-Templating

We design porous materials using freeze-casting, a technique that uses solvent crystals as a pore template.

The key concept of this technique is that crystals grow in a habit along a temperature gradient, allowing us to produce highly ordered and interconnected pore morphologies.

We are now focusing on understanding crystallization behavior to solve academic issues with this technique in terms of poor mechanical properties and uniformity.

1.2 Drug Crystallization

Crystallization is a widely employed process in the pharmaceutical industry to purify drugs. This process involves the formation of solid crystals from a saturated solution, whereby a solid compound precipitates out in a crystalline form. Our research focuses on the crystallization behavior of drugs, utilizing this technique to purify/separate target drugs from various compounds and conjugates. Also, by incorporating different salts and polymers during the crystallization process, we manipulate nucleation and growth behaviors across varying degrees of supersaturation. This approach allows us to design drug crystals with significantly altered dissolution profiles, stability, and efficacy compared to pure drug crystals.