Scott White was a young University of Illinois researcher in 1998, eager to share his excitement about the potential of self-healing materials and possibly initiate a collaboration with a young chemistry professor he had found through a search of the U of I Web site. White found himself sitting with one of his students in Jeff Moore's office, putting on a one-man show for a one-person audience - a silent one person audience.

"He was very pleasant and nice but I was doing all the talking," White said. "I told him this is what we want to do and waving my arms around a lot. He was just looking at us and being pleasant. I think he said something like 'yeah, well, it sounds interesting, I'll think about it.'"

Moore was actually thinking he already had enough projects, thank you, on his plate without adding another. But White isn't the type to give up easily, so after not hearing back from Moore he went to visit him again.

"I guess Jeff just thought 'well I'm not going to get rid of him unless I say something,' so he started saying a few things," White said. "So it just sort of organically evolved from that point forward."

What evolved was a collaboration that not only led to a seminal paper on self-healing materials published in Nature in 2001, but also to a longstanding partnership between Moore, White, and Nancy Sottos that could serve as a model for doing interdisciplinary research.

Sottos is a faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Department, while White is from Aerospace Engineering, and Moore from Chemistry. They are key members of the Beckman Institute's Autonomous Materials System group who have seen their initial success with the Nature paper validated as their work now serves as a pillar for this fastgrowing research area. The work has also expanded into a research line for the trio that is generating new discoveries and attracting increased funding.

Sometimes researchers will collaborate over a number of years as these three have, but the approach of Sottos, White, and Moore to research and to working with each other and with students is as distinctive as it is successful. Their students may come from different disciplines but they often become blended in projects as interdisciplinary interactions are the norm in their group. Their research efforts draw a lot of attention but all three are happy to share the spotlight with each other and with students.

In a previous article, Moore described the partnership this way: "After working with someone that long you find mutual interests and I just enjoy being with them. My life at the University of Illinois is greatly enhanced by this group and that's not just lip service. I can tell you honestly there is probably a good chance I wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for the connections I have with this group."

Recently, the trio sat down for an interview session to talk about the origins of their partnership and their first paper on selfhealing materials, as well their approaches to research and working with students and each other.

A Collaboration of Opportunity and Necessity

The partnership began when Sottos arrived at Illinois in 1991 just a few months after White, occupying an office at Talbot Lab that turned out to be right next to White's office.

Sottos: It also turned that out that after I met Scott I found out that we had been running in the same circles for years but had never met each other. We had gone to some of the same meetings as graduate students. We both have backgrounds in composite materials but with a subtly different focus. Scott's focus when he first got here was on how to make a composite and how to integrate many things into a composite material, and my focus was on small-scale experimental methods, how the different components in a composite interact at almost a molecular level. Throughout our first couple of years we used to go to lunch and discuss sort of blue sky type research projects and how we might collaborate, because as assistant professors you are kind of in a track doing your own thing. At some point the idea of selfhealing came up, which ties in with some of the things that both Scott and I were working on about adding extra functionality, sort of unusual multi-functionality, into composites, into polymers, giving them functions that they don't normally have... Self-healing became one of those functions and we got a very small research grant from the Army Corps of Engineers to look at concepts for self-healing. That was just an engineering study, though. What came out of that study was that we thought that microcapsules were a good idea, and that microencapsulation was the way to go if you wanted to bring in this self-healing functionality. We quickly tried a couple of chemistries that we knew but they were somewhat limited. Then Scott went to visit Jeff.

White: Nancy and I and Philippe Geubelle worked together for a while thinking about concept development for self-healing systems. We had a small grant around 1995. We started hatching out ideas and the microcapsule concept was one we were looking at. With the concepts that we wanted to pursue, it became very clear very quickly that we were in over our heads in terms of the chemistry involved. Then I looked on the U of I Web site and did some searching for stellar, outstanding, wonderful chemist with knowledge of polymers and it came up empty (drawing laughs). But then I found Jeff's name and went over to his office with a student of mine at the time... I took it at face value that he was actually going to think about it and get back and we left. But he didn't get back, so I said we need to go talk to Jeff again. So we went back.

Sottos: As Jeff will tell it, Scott was persistent. Once Jeff got involved, he suggested the chemistry that we eventually used in the Nature paper. It was something that Scott and I would never have dreamed of using on our own. It was very new, very different, and we just would not have had the experience to work with the catalyst.