Heather Maynard, an associate professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, US, works in the area of polymers and biomolecules. Her research interests include protein-polymer conjugates, protein arrays and polymeric drugs. Heather is also a member of the California Nanosystems Institute and has recently been appointed to the Editorial Board of ChemComm.

When did you decide to become a scientist? 

I think I was born a scientist, but I just didn't know it. As I child, I enjoyed mystery books and solving mysteries. I would do experiments on plants - giving them more or less sunlight or water and look at the effects on growth. But I didn't realize I was a scientist. I was 12 years old when I took a science class and I said 'oh-this is what I am'. I don't think I ever considered anything else. 

What led you to the field of polymers? 

I took a polymer course during my undergraduate degree and I found it so exciting. The fact that you could take the same monomer, and depending on how you polymerized it, you could get completely different outcomes or properties. So you could make something that was a hard plastic to hold liquids and then the same monomer could make something really soft such as a dry cleaning bag, The teacher demonstrated a living anionic polymerization, right there, in the class, under inert conditions. After that I was hooked -I knew I wanted to become a polymer chemist. 

Where do you get your ideas from now, what inspires you? 

I'm inspired the most by talking to scientists who are outside of my field. At UCLA I am part of an institute that is very diverse - it has medical doctors and life scientists as well as engineers. Just talking with them I begin to understand the problems that others face and how chemistry, or specifically my chemistry, can help solve them. That is how I generate the most ideas. 

Some of your recent work has been in protein patterning, could you tell us more about this? 

Here is one example derived from talking to various engineers. They said they would like to be able to pattern more than one protein at the nanoscale, which is very difficult. First, I wrote a review for Soft Matter where I looked at everything that had been done with nanopatterning of biomolecules and proteins, and proteins on surfaces. Next I examined the pros and cons of various techniques. One of the limitations of electron beam lithography was that you couldn't use it to make patterns of more than one protein. I thought that would be a fantastic challenge so I started to look at how we could use electron beam lithography to pattern multiple proteins. We ended up doing that both in two and three dimensions. One of my particular interests for use of this technology is to create cell adhesive substrates. We would like to be able to present multiple ligands sub-cellularly. I think these techniques could be used to do that or explore those. 

How do you see the future of polymers? 

I think the future of polymers is bright. We have so many uses for polymers now and I think that will only increase. As we, as a community, learn to control architecture and functionality to be able to integrate biomolecules in very specific ways, we should find more applications. So I imagine that polymers will play more and more of a role in helping us solve a lot of the problems facing the world today, such as the energy crisis, water purification and many health issues. 

What is the best thing about your job? 

For me, it's the freedom to be creative. I can think of an idea and ask my students to try it that day. I also enjoy mentoring students and helping them to learn to think critically and creatively. 

What achievement, scientific or otherwise, are you most proud of? 

I was able to show that proteins can be made to initiate polymerisation to form protein-polymer conjugates in situ and maintain the activity of the protein 100 per cent. I am excited about that because there are so many uses for protein-polymer conjugates in the medical field: to treat cancer or hepatitis for example. This gives researchers an alternative way to make these conjugates. More importantly it may actually be a way to make materials that weren't possible before. Scientifically, that is my most important achievement. Another achievement that I am proud of is my involvement in a US-Argentinean workshop on nanomaterials. I co-organized it with a colleague from the University of Buenos Aires. I'm proud of this because it was the first bilateral cooperation in nanotechnology between the two countries. We were able to bring researchers from the countires together and write a proposal to the two governments suggesting how they can foster collaboration. To potentially have some impact on governmental policy in that way was amazing.