Position
Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Office Phone
609-258-6513

Email
wjacobs@princeton.edu

Office
385 Frick Chemistry Laboratory

Website
http://jacobs.princeton.edu

CV
Jacobs CV

Degrees
B.S., Engineering Science and Physics, University of Virginia, 2010?
Ph.D. Theoretical Chemistry, University of Cambridge, 2014

Advisee(s):
Jessica Jin




Bio/Description

Honors and Awards

NSF CAREER Award, 2021
NIH-Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Fellowship, 2016
Gates Cambridge Scholar, 2010
NSF Graduate Research Fellow, 2010

Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry
Associated Faculty, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Research Interests

The ability to assemble complex nanoscale structures from a collection of chemical building blocks is one of the essential features of all living systems.? Biology provides many examples of programmable self-assembly, where the spatial organization that emerges is dictated by reversible interactions among a pool of subunits and their environment.? Yet in cases where self-assembly occurs under kinetic or non-equilibrium control, and in systems containing an enormous number of distinct components, our ability to predict emergent structures remains limited.? This gap in our knowledge similarly affects our ability to engineer bio-mimetic materials, where we must solve the inverse problem of designing building blocks to assemble into prescribed structures.
Taking inspiration from biology, our goal is to identify general principles governing the assembly of complex, molecular-scale structures.? We are primarily interested in how two key features of living matter -- the heterogeneity of multicomponent systems and the production of entropy by active processes -- affect the properties of self-assembled structures.? Our current efforts focus on predicting spatial organization in phase-separating protein/nucleic-acid mixtures and developing non-equilibrium strategies to optimize the assembly of multicomponent nanostructures.? To accomplish these goals, our group uses statistical mechanics, coarse-grained models, and computer simulation methods that probe a broad range of length and time scales.

Selected Publications
A. Hensley, W.M. Jacobs, and W.B. Rogers, “Self‐assembly of photonic crystals by controlling the nucleation and growth of DNA‐coated colloids,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 119, e2114050118 (2022).
W.M. Jacobs, “Self‐assembly of biomolecular condensates with shared components,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 258101 (2021).
D.W. Sanders, ..., W.M. Jacobs, P. Ivanov, and C.P. Brangwynne, “Competing protein‐‐RNA interaction networks control multiphase intracellular organization,” Cell 181, 306–324 (2020).
W.M. Jacobs and E.I. Shakhnovich, “Evidence of evolutionary selection for co-translational folding,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 114, 11434–11439 (2017).
W.M. Jacobs and D. Frenkel, “Phase transitions in biological systems with many components,” Biophys. J. 112, 683–691 (2017).
W.M. Jacobs and D. Frenkel, “Self-assembly of structures with addressable complexity,” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 138, 2457–2467 (2016).
W.M. Jacobs, A. Reinhardt, and D. Frenkel, “Rational design of self-assembly pathways for complex multicomponent structures,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112, 6313–6318 (2015).?
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Research Areas
Biomolecular Engineering
Complex Materials and Processing
Theory and Computation