Dr. Michelle Gaines
Abstract
Hair is a natural polymeric and highly complex biocomposite system, which has been traditionally challenging to characterize and thus develop functional personal care products for consumers. The goal of this research is to use quantitative methods to identify new geometric parameters, which will be more representative of all curl patterns – straight, wavy, curly, kinky. These new parameters will help consumers determine the kinds of personal care product ingredients that will best resonate with their natural hair type. The goal is also to correlate these new parameters with its mechanical and interfacial surface properties. In this work, several distinguishing geometric features (ellipticity, curl morphology, and cuticle structure) were identified and developed into a new patent-pending hair typing system. This new classification system is based on quantitative measurements gathered on single hair fibers collected from subjects possessing the full spectrum of curl types (n=15). Hair fiber mechanics were compared between the curl types by measuring force as a function of applied displacement, thus allowing the relationship between stress and applied stretch ratio to be measured as a hair strand uncurls and stretches to the point of fracture. From the resulting data, correlations were made between fiber geometry, hair porosity, and mechanical performance, providing useful insight on the impact that curl geometric structure has on fiber macro-material properties.
Bio
Michelle Gaines is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Spelman College. She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science & Engineering at North Carolina State University, and her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University. After completing several postdocs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. Gaines has developed a rich, interdisciplinary research background in polymer materials chemistry, nanocomposite interfacial behavior, and biophysics of collective cell behavior.
In addition to her primary duties as a teacher-scholar for the core chemical sciences, Dr. Gaines is part of the Cosmetic Science Faculty. She teaches several courses for the Chemistry Cosmetic Science curriculum, including the Black Hair Laboratory, where students use polymer fiber science to characterize their own hair and test it on their own cosmetic formulations. Dr. Gaines also teaches a class for the Cosmetic Science eSpelman Certificate program, a program developed for non-Spelman students to learn about the chemistry and materials science of cosmetics. Finally, Dr. Gaines manages an undergraduate research lab, where she and her students design and characterize the surface chemical properties of synthetic and natural stimuli responsive biomaterials to develop multifunctional biomaterials for regenerative medicine and personal care products. She was awarded a LEAPS (Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in Mathematical and Physical Sciences) NSF grant, which funds her research on designing polymer microgel particle suspensions into 3D cell scaffolds to culture cells in 3-dimensions according to their native microenvironment and probe malignant cell behavior in abnormal tissues. Among the most notable of Dr. Gaines’s contributions to Cosmetic Science research was publishing her first peer-reviewed original research article on her patent-pending hair classification system in the very well recognized Accounts of Chemical Research journal by the American Chemical Society.