NON TECHNICAL SUMMARY: From desalination membranes to sensors for detecting nerve agents to drug delivery carriers, porous materials represent a critical materials class that supports myriad applications. Over the past several decades, there have been significant advances in developing porous materials with tailorable physical and chemical properties from non-biological components (e.g., metal ions, organic molecules, etc.). However, there is a growing interest in fabricating functional porous materials from biological building blocks (e.g., proteins and peptides), which display unparalleled levels of structural, chemical, and functional diversity as evidenced by the complex and functional assemblies that are ubiquitous in biology. The goal of this project is to establish a new, synthetic route towards building porous materials from peptide-based building blocks. Peptides are ideal assembly building blocks, because they can be synthesized directly in the lab and thus their structural and chemical properties can be systematically tuned to create programmable materials that perform alongside their biological counterparts. Moreover, because they are synthesized chemically, one can easily integrate non-biological features to further diversify and enhance peptide-based materials with novel properties that extend beyond nature. This NSF project establishes a new family of porous materials that are derived from synthetically modified collagen-mimetic peptides. Results from this p