Dr. Priestley uses physics, chemistry, and engineering to help design new nanomaterials, which can be used for better drug delivery.

Dr. Priestley has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Texas Tech University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University. Before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. He is the Associate Director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials, Faculty Co-Director of the Princeton Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellows Program, and will become Princeton’s first Vice Dean for Innovation tomorrow.

Nanoparticles are increasingly a focus of research in medicine. They have the potential to be used for both diagnostics and drug delivery, because they are small enough to circulate through the bloodstream and even enter into cells. This allows for slow release of the drug into the body over a longer period of time, reducing side effects and toxicity. This slow release can also be useful for getting different dyes to an organ for better diagnostic imaging.

However, there is a lot that is still unknown about the physical and chemical properties of nanoparticles. This information is necessary in order to predict how a particular kind of nanoparticles will behave in the body: will they interact with the drug they’re supposed to be delivering in a harmful way? Will they aggregate together inside the body instead of traveling through the bloodstream? How much drug is being released at a time and how long will it stay active?

Dr. Priestley’s group focuses a lot on studying these physical and chemical properties, as well as the search for more efficient and environmentally-friendly methods for making nanoparticles. In particular, a lot of his research focuses on a technique called flash nanoprecipitation or FNP. In FNP, the ingredients for a nanoparticle (e.g. a drug and a plastic to encapsulate it) are both dissolved in solution. That solution is then rapidly mixed with a second liquid that they are less able to dissolve in, which causes the nanoparticles to spontaneously form as they precipitate out of solution. This process is very quick and easy to do at large scales and doesn’t require a lot of energy.