Joseph Patterson

Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry

Biography

Joseph Patterson, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. A scholar in the fields of polymer chemistry and electron microscopy, Patterson has developed methods to visualize molecular self-assembly processes in real time using liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy. His research focuses on understanding the nucleation and growth mechanisms of soft materials, including block copolymer assemblies, metal-organic frameworks, and biomolecular condensates.

Patterson is a member of the Microscopy Society of America, where he serves as Placement Officer Chair. He received the Burton Medal from the Microscopy Society of America in 2023 and was awarded an NSF CAREER Award in 2023. His research program has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Institutes of Health.

Patterson has published 98 peer-reviewed articles with over 4,000 citations and an h-index of 38. He has organized multiple symposia on liquid-phase electron microscopy and serves as co-Director of Education and Outreach for the UCI NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. Patterson received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Warwick in 2013 and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego and Eindhoven University of Technology, where he held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.

Education

MChem in Chemistry, University of York, 2009
PhD in Chemistry, University of Warwick, 2013

Distinctions

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, 2017
NSF CAREER Award, DMR Polymers, 2023
ACS Polymers Au, Rising Stars, 2022
American Chemical Society PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award, 2020
Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Emerging Investigator, 2020
Microscopy Society of America – Burton Medal, 2023
RSC Macrogroup UK Young Polymer Scientist of the Year, 2011
Beall Innovation Award, 2020
Jon Weaver PhD Prize, 2013
UCI Department of Chemistry Excellence in Mentorship Award, 2022
Warwick Transatlantic Fellowship, 2013
DH Richards Bursary, 2012

Areas of Expertise

Liquid Phase Electron Microscopy
Block Copolymer Self-Assembly
Metal-Organic Framework Nucleation
Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy
Electrochemically Driven Active Materials
Protein-Polymer Condensate Interfaces
Disulfide Hydrogel Dynamics

Recent Publications

Idris N.S., Naseer M., Mulvey J.T., Rizvi A., Nguyen N.A.T., Patterson J.P., “Understanding the Encapsulation Behavior of Nile Red within Nonionic Block Copolymer Coacervates and Self-Assembled Particles” (opens in new tab), Macromolecules, vol. 59, pp. 1307-1315, 2026.
Mulvey, J., Zeinalvand, L., Prasad, P. R., Sun, H., Pen, M., Perez Garza, H., Hochbaum, A., Patterson, J. P., “In situ Liquid Cell Electron Microscopy with Simultaneous Control of Heating, Biasing, and Flow” (opens in new tab), Nano Letters, vol. 25, pp. 13482-13489, 2025.
Olivas, E. M., Rose, B., Carpenter, B. P., Talosig, A. R., Di Palma, G., Lee, J., Mulvey, J. T., O' Leary, S. L., Watt, J., Patterson, J. P., “Role of Ammonium Hydroxide on Glucose Oxidase Immobilized in Metal–Azolate Framework-7 Enzyme Activity” (opens in new tab), Chemistry of Materials, vol. 37, pp. 6347-6355, 2025.
López, P. A., Eivgi, O., Idris, N. S., Patterson, J. P., Blum, S. A., “Self-Assembly Methods Induce Different Individual-Polymer-Block Solvation Responses” (opens in new tab), Chemistry – A European Journal, vol. 31, 2025.
Hwang, J. H., Yoon, J., Seo, M., Patterson, J. P., Lee, E., “Decoding the evolution and dynamics of semicrystalline block copolymer assembly via liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy” (opens in new tab), Matter, vol. 8, pp. 102148, 2025.
Mulvey J.T., Prasad P.R., Chen Z., Palmer L.D., Layne B.W., Korican-Barlay E., Watanabe K., Xu M., Talin A.A., Pan X., Kudo A., Cushing S.K., Ardo S., Patterson J.P., “Direct Observation of Rh and La Dopant Positions in SrTiO3Nanoparticles with Atomic-Scale Electron Microscopy” (opens in new tab), ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, vol. 17, pp. 63374-63383, 2025.
Casas, A. M., Idris, N. S., Wen, V., Patterson, J. P., Ge, N.-H., “Scattering Elimination in 2D IR Immune from Detector Artifacts” (opens in new tab), The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, vol. 128, no. 36, pp. 8835-8845, 2024.
Rizvi, A., Favetta, B., Jaber, N., Lee, Y.-K., Jiang, J., Idris, N. S., Schuster, B. S., Dai, W., Patterson, J. P., “Revealing nanoscale structure and interfaces of protein and polymer condensates via cryo-electron microscopy” (opens in new tab), Nanoscale, vol. 16, no. 35, pp. 16706-16717, 2024.
Gibson, W., Mulvey, J. T., Das, S., Selmani, S., Merham, J. G., Rakowski, A. M., Schwartz, E., Hochbaum, A. I., Guan, Z., Green, J. R., Patterson, J. P., “Observing the Dynamics of an Electrochemically Driven Active Material with Liquid Electron Microscopy” (opens in new tab), ACS Nano, vol. 8, no. 18, pp. 11898-11909, 2024.
Talosig, A. R., Wang, F., Mulvey, J. T., Carpenter, B. P., Olivas, E. M., Katz, B. B., Zhu, C., Patterson, J. P., “Understanding the Nucleation and Growth of ZIF-8 Polymorphs” (opens in new tab), Crystal Growth and Design, vol. 24, pp. 4136-4142, 2024.
Hurst, P. J., Yoon, J., Singh, R., Abouchaleh, M. F., Stewart, K. A., Sumerlin, B. S., Patterson, J. P., “Hybrid Photoiniferter and Ring-Opening Polymerization Yields One-Pot Anisotropic Nanorods” (opens in new tab), Macromolecular Rapid Communications, vol. 45, no. 12, pp. 2400100, 2024.
Rizvi, A., Patterson, J. P., “Liquid–liquid phase separation induced auto-confinement” (opens in new tab), Soft Matter, vol. 20, no. 9, pp. 1978-1982, 2024.
Hurst, P. J., Gassaway, K. J., Abouchaleh, M. F., Idris, N. S., Jones, C. R., Dicksion, C. A., Nowick, J. S., Patterson, J. P., “Drug catalyzed polymerization yields one pot nanomedicines” (opens in new tab), RSC Applied Polymers, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 238-247, 2024.
Hurst, P. J., Mulvey, J. T., Bone, R. A., Selmani, S., Hudson, R. F., Guan, Z., Green, J. R., Patterson, J. P., “CryoEM reveals the complex self-assembly of a chemically driven disulfide hydrogel” (opens in new tab), Chemical Science, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 1106-1116, 2024.
Carpenter, B. P., Rose, B., Olivas, E. M., Navarro, M. X., Talosig, A. R., Hurst, P. J., Di Palma, G., Xing, L., Guha, R., Copp, S. M., Patterson, J. P., “The role of protein folding in prenucleation clusters on the activity of enzyme@metal–organic frameworks” (opens in new tab), Journal of Materials Chemistry A, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 813-823, 2024.
Kunnas, P., de Jonge, N., Patterson, J. P., “The effect of nanochannel length on in situ loading times of diffusion-propelled nanoparticles in liquid cell electron microscopy” (opens in new tab), Ultramicroscopy, vol. 255, pp. 113865, 2024.
Mulvey, J. T., Iyer, K. P., Ortega, T., Merham, J. G., Pivak, Y., Sun, H., Hochbaum, A. I., Patterson, J. P., “Correlating electrochemical stimulus to structural change in liquid electron microscopy videos using the structural dissimilarity metric” (opens in new tab), Ultramicroscopy, vol. 257, pp. 113894, 2024.
Olivas E., Watt J., Patterson J., “Probing Enzyme@Metal-Organic Framework Interactions for Enhanced Stability and Catalytic Efficiency Using Cryogenic Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (CryoEELS) and Energy-Filtered TEM (EF-TEM)” (opens in new tab), Microscopy and Microanalysis, vol. 30, pp. 1262-1263, 2024.
Dhaoui, R., Cazarez, S. L., Xing, L., Baghdadi, E., Mulvey, J. T., Idris, N. S., Hurst, P. J., Vena, M. P., Palma, G. D., Patterson, J. P., “3D Visualization of Proteins within Metal–Organic Frameworks via Ferritin-Enabled Electron Microscopy” (opens in new tab), Advanced Functional Materials, vol. 34, pp. 2312972, 2023.
Carpenter, B. P., Talosig, A. R., Rose, B., Di Palma, G., Patterson, J. P., “Understanding and controlling the nucleation and growth of metal–organic frameworks” (opens in new tab), Chemical Society Reviews, vol. 52, no. 20, pp. 6918-6937, 2023.

Most Cited Publications

Ianiro, A., Wu, H., van Rijt, M. M. J., Vena, M. P., Keizer, A. D. A., Esteves, A. C. C., Tuinier, R., Friedrich, H., Sommerdijk, N., Patterson, J. P., “Liquid-liquid phase separation during amphiphilic self-assembly” (opens in new tab), Nature Chemistry, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 320-328, 2019.
Patterson, J. P., Abellan, P., Denny, M. S., Jr., Park, C., Browning, N. D., Cohen, S. M., Evans, J. E., Gianneschi, N. C., “Observing the growth of metal-organic frameworks by in situ liquid cell transmission electron microscopy” (opens in new tab), Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 137, no. 23, pp. 7322-8, 2015.
Patterson, J. P., Robin, M. P., Chassenieux, C., Colombani, O., O'Reilly, R. K., “The analysis of solution self-assembled polymeric nanomaterials” (opens in new tab), Chemical Society Reviews, vol. 43, no. 8, pp. 2412-25, 2014.
McHale, R., Patterson, J. P., Zetterlund, P. B., O'Reilly, R. K., “Biomimetic radical polymerization via cooperative assembly of segregating templates” (opens in new tab), Nature Chemistry, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 491-7, 2012.
Ogata, A. F., Rakowski, A. M., Carpenter, B. P., Fishman, D. A., Merham, J. G., Hurst, P. J., Patterson, J. P., “Direct Observation of Amorphous Precursor Phases in the Nucleation of Protein-Metal-Organic Frameworks” (opens in new tab), Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 142, no. 3, pp. 1433-1442, 2020.
Wu, H., Friedrich, H., Patterson, J. P., Sommerdijk, N., de Jonge, N., “Liquid-Phase Electron Microscopy for Soft Matter Science and Biology” (opens in new tab), Advanced Materials, vol. 32, no. 25, pp. e2001582, 2020.
Du, J., Willcock, H., Patterson, J. P., Portman, I., O'Reilly, R. K., “Self-assembly of hydrophilic homopolymers: a matter of RAFT end groups” (opens in new tab), Small, vol. 7, no. 14, pp. 2070-80, 2011.
Cotanda, P., Lu, A., Patterson, J. P., Petzetakis, N., O'Reilly, R. K., “Functionalized Organocatalytic Nanoreactors: Hydrophobic Pockets for Acylation Reactions in Water” (opens in new tab), Macromolecules, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 2377-2384, 2012.
Hurst, P. J., Rakowski, A. M., Patterson, J. P., “Ring-opening polymerization-induced crystallization-driven self-assembly of poly-L-lactide-block-polyethylene glycol block copolymers (ROPI-CDSA)” (opens in new tab), Nature Communications, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 4690, 2020.
Patterson, J. P., Xu, Y., Moradi, M. A., Sommerdijk, N., Friedrich, H., “CryoTEM as an Advanced Analytical Tool for Materials Chemists” (opens in new tab), Accounts of Chemical Research, vol. 50, no. 7, pp. 1495-1501, 2017.

Contact Information

Website: https://www.ThePattersonLab.com

Email: patters3@uci.edu

Phone: (949) 529-6854

Address: 577 Rowland Hall, Irvine, CA 92697-2025

This profile was created with the help of AI.

Last updated on 10/31/2026.