Research Highlight

Professor Ryan Baxter has been funded by the NSF with a 5-year CAREER award. Professor Baxter is developing new strategies for initiating radical reactions through single-electron transfers. Because one electron reactions (radical reactions) are traditionally viewed as highly reactive and difficult to control, the goal of this research is to better understand fundamental properties of radical initiations to engineer mild and user-friendly experimental protocols.

Professor Hrant Hratchian's work published in JCP is chosen as an Editor's Pick! In this collaborative work with Dan Neumark's spectroscopy group at UC Berkeley, electron velocity-map imaging spectroscopy of cryogenically cooled TiO3H2− anions is used to reveal Herzberg-Teller coupling-induced transitions to Franck-Condon forbidden vibrational levels of the neutral ground state.

Professor Christine Isborn's recently published paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics describing a new method for modeling absorption spectra for molecules in solution has been chosen as an Editor's Pick.

The Journal of Physical Chemistry highlights the research of 66 distinguished women scientists in their Marie Curie Virtual Issue. Professor Anne Myers Kelley's work on Raman spectroscopy is included as one of the highlights:

Professor Hratchian is awarded a Hellman Family Fellowship

Professor Hrant Hratchian has been named a Hellman Family Faculty Fellow. During the fellowship period (2017-2018 Academic Year), the Hratchian Group will pursue the development of efficient electronic structure theory models and will continue exploring the structure and chemistry of metal oxides.

A group of eight faculty received a DoD HBCU/MI instrumentation grant for $495,850 to acquire three new instruments for shared research use:
 
·         A Bruker Vertex 70 research grade FTIR with far-IR and ATR capabilities.
 
·         A Horiba Fluorolog-3 research grade spectrofluorometer with CCD detector and microwell plate reader.
 
·         A Thermo Electron high resolution liquid chromatograph/mass spectrometer (in partnership with the NSF-CREST center, there are two instruments with complementary capabilities).
 

The Stokes group publishes their work on new catalytic intramolecular hydroarylations of β-(α,α-dimethylbenzyl)styrenes in Organic Letters.

Professor Anand Subramaniam's research on synthetic biological membranes appears as the cover of the December 7th issue of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Research in the Stokes group shows that diboron complexes mediate catalysis of hydrogenation of alkenes by water. This work was recently published in JACS.

LiWang's research on circadian clocks is in Science magazine.

Here is a news write-up.