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Faculty & Staff Profile

Maxx Q. Arguilla

Associate Professor

CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING

Email: marguill@uci.edu
Address: UCI Samueli School of Engineering Irvine, CA 92697
Zot Code: 2025
Office: 4124 Natural Sciences I

Maxx Q. Arguilla originates from the Philippines. He obtained his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) in 2011. After a one-year junior instructor position at UPD, he moved to the US and completed his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from The Ohio State University with Professor Joshua Goldberger in 2017. His dissertation centered on the electronic, optical, and magnetic properties and applications of new two-dimensional solid state lattices in the bulk and at the nanoscale. He then moved to MIT as postdoctoral fellow in Professor Mircea Dinca’s group, where he focused on the growth of one-dimensional van der Waals crystals and the evolution of their physical properties as they transform into ultrathin nanowires and on establishing the fundamental anisotropic physical properties of two-dimensional metal-organic frameworks. He serves as a member of several advisory boards including the Eddleman Quantum Institute, Chemical & Engineering News, Chemistry of Materials, and Materials Chemistry Frontiers.

Ph.D., Inorganic Chemistry, 2017; The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

B.S., Chemistry, 2011; University of the Philippines Diliman, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines

The Arguilla group (Maxx X Lab) seeks to establish the chemical rules involved in the creation of a new paradigm in functional inorganic crystals: the discovery of materials comprised of weakly bound one-dimensional (1D) chains that can be crafted into stand-alone or hierarchically ordered building blocks for next-generation devices and integrated circuits approaching the atomic scale. To this end, the group answers two fundamental questions: How small can inorganic materials be?...as this would lead to quantum-confined states and the densest integrated circuits and devices; and How can complexity be encoded into sub-nanoscale solids?...as this would enable us to re-envision more efficient information carriers than electrical charges such as photons, magnetic spin, atomic vibrations, and emergent quantum bits. The group pioneers the chemistry of crystalline solids that either manifest 1D structural motifs or are composed of sub-nanometer-thin and non-covalently bound chains. These can be thought of as “all-inorganic” analogues of organic polymers or as 1D versions of two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials like graphene. The group has established chemical design rules that underpin how these materials can be synthetically programmed to grow as ultrathin nanostructures with confined states, manifest diverse and rare coordination motifs, and be chemically directed to assemble into complex nanostructures across various dimensions. The following are the active research thrusts in the group: (1) Chemistry of INTRA-chain interactions: Discovery of chiral 1D vdW crystals with unusual motifs and properties; (2) Chemistry of INTER-chain interactions: Directed assembly of functional and ultrathin 1D vdW nanocrystals into complex geometries; and (3) Chemistry of INTER-phase interactions: Precision synthesis of functional 1D-1D heterointerfaces approaching the atomic limit.