The Knight Research Group

The Knight Research Group is one the newest in the UNC Chemistry Department, as Abigail, “Abby,” Knight joined us as an Assistant Professor in the summer of 2018. However, Abby is a returnee to Carolina Chemistry. She completed her undergraduate science degree here, majoring in Chemistry, with minors in Mathematics and Biology.

As an undergraduate she was a participant in the Public Service Scholars Program, served as a Resident Advisor, and she completed an honors thesis in Professor Marcey Waters’ research group, developing new ligands for RNA and DNA structures.

After graduating from UNC, Abby continued her doctoral studies in the chemical biology program at the University of California, Berkeley, where she joined the lab of Professor Matthew Francis. Her doctoral research focused on the development of a platform applying combinatorial libraries for the identification of selective metal ligands to address major challenges in water and environmental remediation and metal poisoning. Her work on designing materials for the remediation of hexavalent chromium contamination, the toxin that received worldwide attention with the story of Erin Brockovich, was highlighted in Wired magazine with an article titled “We’ve got the secret to cleaner water: more plastic.” Concepts and techniques from this work including peptidomimetic synthesis, design of high-throughput strategies, and the application of interdisciplinary approaches to identify new tools to approach global problems are at the forefront of the Knight group’s current research goals.

As her research interests crystallized around the overlap of chemical biology and materials science, Abby selected a postdoctoral position with Prof. Craig Hawker at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral scholar, she designed smart nanomaterials with a multitude of architectures, including the development of peptide-polymer amphiphiles that assembled into distinct nanomaterial shapes upon coordination of different transition metal ions. These pursuits provided expertise in materials characterization, support-

The Knight Research Group

ing the Knight Research Group’s mission to design synthetic nanomaterials that rival the binding capabilities of proteins.

When Abby returned to Carolina in July of 2018, the group consisted of her and a single undergraduate student, Delaney Davis, who spent the summer assembling the research laboratory on the third floor of Caudill Laboratories. Since then, the Knight Research Group has rapidly grown and now consists of six undergraduate students, six graduate students, and a postdoctoral researcher.

Abby’s research targets a deeper understanding of how to generate macromolecular materials with complex functions inspired by biological systems. To tackle this challenge, her interdisciplinary research team uses techniques and perspectives from synthetic chemistry, chemical biology, and polymer science.

One group of researchers is targeting mimicking metalloproteins – proteins that serve critical biological roles in storage and transport and catalysis with finely tuned metal-binding sites. Another group is taking inspiration from Nobel Prize winning directed evolution to identify a complementary screening strategy to identify synthetic materials with desirable binding properties.

Outside of the lab, Abby is engaged in the department through developing a new course in bioorganic chemistry, as an advisor to the Graduate Committee for Professional Development, and through leading the organization of the first annual graduate student proposal development competition “Sci-athon,” modeled after the Scialog program sponsored by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement to promote cross-divisional scientific dialog.

In the broader scientific community, Abby is a member of the Early Career Advisory Board for ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering and her group is actively engaged in bringing their research to the larger North Carolina community.