My name is Yu Zhang, associate professor at
the biomaterials department at NYU
College of Dentistry.
I have always been
fascinated by material science; its
impact on human civilization is enormous,
so we try to create new structures, new
materials which never existed
before. Our approach is using a glass
infiltration method, so we in theory
treat various glass compositions into strong
ceramic components such as zirconia and
alumina. And in this way now on the
surface of the material you can have
aesthetics, you have our activities. In
some cases you can even have
antimicrobial properties and a better
integration with bone, better integration with
soft tissue. But on the interior now you
have strong materials; metals and
ceramics give you the structural
stability. But you also want a good fatigue
life, so we do this fatigue testing using a
mouth chewing simulator to see how well
they hold up. And then we're going to
harvest the sample and then looking
at the damages sustended from this kind
of fatigue testing. The material we made
actually is much better resistance to
fatigue damage than most of the commercial
materials. I think that's what makes the
material very attractive; it have
excellent potential. It can be stronger
than teeth, that's for sure, but I think
the impact is much broader. It can be
used in a lot of engineering
applications where material is exposed
to very harsh environment, very demanding
environment, these kinds of applications.
We have been working on this project for
over 10 years,
attracting federal grants like NSF, NIH
grants totaling over 10 million dollars.
I think that the most important thing is,
NYU Dentistry has
a fantastic research environment and it
provides us with a unique opportunity to
directly interact with clinicians.
This way we can effectively identify
clinical problems and tackle these problems head-on. And we also integrate
this kind of research activities into
teaching, to educate next
generation scientists and dentists.
This kind of training opens up a lot of
opportunities for our students. The next
step, I think, we will continue with this
kind of nano structural design. I have
combined both to make it a gradient
structure with nano crystals, and in this
way, we can come up with those
new biomedical prostheses and the
implant devices that we never could
have anticipated before.
