We are pleased to announce that the 2022 M. A. Battiste Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, sponsored by Petra Research, was awarded to Chieh-Yu Chang and Zaafir Dulloo. The award recognizes excellence in synthetic organic chemistry by a 3rd year graduate student who has completed their oral qualifying examination. Chieh-Yu’s work is focused on novel applications of atropsiomeric stack ligands in asymmetric catalysis, and Zaafir’s work involves the synthesis and formulation of cyclic thiosulfonates as novel agents against breast cancer.
Congratulations Chieh-Yu and Zaafir!
2022 M.A. Battiste Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry recipients, Chieh-Yu Chang (left) and Zaafir Dulloo (right).
Interconnected-Nanocrystal Networks-Reflections in the Surreal Mirror
An Interconnected-Nanocrystal Network Expends the Synthetically Accessible Chemical Space for Materials Design.
August 18, 2022
Solids from a collection of atoms can adopt a variety of structural phases having respective physical and chemical properties, providing entire chemical space for materials discovery. At ambient conditions, there is often one thermodynamically stable phase for a given atomic collection, and the rest can potentially become metastable as kinetically trapped phases with positive free energies above the equilibrium state. However, a general strategy for engineering kinetic barriers has yet to be developed but is essential for the rational synthesis of new materials and for expanding the space of synthesizable metastable materials.
Recently, the Cao group has invented a method of using interparticle sintering to engineer kinetic barriers between the phase transformations in nanocrystals, producing ambient metastable structures in a controllable manner. The resulting interconnected nanocrystal networks are identified as a new form of matter for hosting metastable high-energy phases at ambient conditions. This finding suggests general rules for transformation-barrier engineering which is important for rational design of next-generation materials.
Dr. Julien Papillon and Prof. Christopher Vanderwal visits UF Chemistry Dept.
The Organic Division hosted Dr. Julien Papillon (Novartis, left) and Prof. Christopher Vanderwal (University of California at Irvine).
Thank you to Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research for sponsoring the Novartis Chemical Science Lectureship at the University of Florida.
2022 Tarrant Summer Graduate Research Fellowship recipients Announced
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022 Tarrant Summer Graduate Research Fellowship. The endowment honors Prof. Paul Tarrant, a member of our department from 1946 to 1981, and this award promotes outstanding research for graduate students working in the division of Organic Chemistry.
This year’s recipients are Alec Esper, Cory Kornman, Angie Korpusik, and Michael Mannchen.
Alec, who received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the College of Charleston, is a member of Prof. Adam S. Veige’s research group and is working on how triaanionic pincer-supported W(VI) alkylidene catalysts produce cyclic polyacetylenes as well as studying these resulting polymers.
Cory, who received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from The University of West Florida, is a member of Prof. Ronald K. Castellano’s research group and is working on the synthesis and photoisomerization of p-conjugated oligomers functionalized with electron deficient units containing dicyano groups for organic photovoltaic devices.
Angie, who received her M.S. degree in materials science and engineering from UC Berkeley, is a member of Prof. Brent Sumerlin’s research group and is working on self-catalyzed polymerization-induced self-assembly to synthesize nanoparticles for photodynamic therapy.
Michael, who received his B.S. in professional chemistry from the University of Evansville, is a member of Prof. Alexander Grenning’s research group and is working on tandem asymmetric allylic alkylation/Cope rearrangement sequences accessing polysubstituted saturated heterocycles.
UF Analytical Chemistry one of top in nation
We’re excited to announce @usnews has recognized UF Analytical Chemistry as one of the top graduate programs in the country! Congrats to our faculty, staff, and students on their excellence! @UFChemistry @UF_CLAS
Lisa McElwee-White featured on ACS Approval Program website
The newest CPT Profiles story recognizes Lisa McElwee-White as one of the four department chairs serving on the ACS Committee on Professional Training, the group that evaluates undergraduate chemistry programs and gives approval for the institution to grant ACS certified degrees.
Congratulations to our Superior Accomplishment Award winners Jason Portmess and Kiersten Allison!! These are university-wide awards that recognize efforts that go the extra mile and beyond the person’s normal assigned duties. We are proud to have two winners of these very competitive awards in the department this year.
Tammy Davidson Awarded 2021-2022 CLAS Faculty Advising/Mentoring Award
Tammy Davidson was awarded a 2021-2022 CLAS Faculty Advising/Mentoring Award, which recognizes excellence, innovation, and effectiveness in advising. Dr. Davidson is a Master Lecturer in the Organic Division and serves as Undergraduate Coordinator for the Department of Chemistry.
2021 Keaffaber Scholar Award
The Keaffaber Scholar Award recognizes the overall excellence in research and academic scholarship of one of our senior chemistry majors. To be eligible for the award, the undergraduate must be research active within the Department of Chemistry and committed to pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry.
This year, the recipients of the Keaffaber Scholar Award are Samantha Velazquez and Victor Suarez.
Samantha Velazquez, is pursuing a chemistry degree with a minor in English. Her passion for chemistry began when she took organic chemistry her freshman year. In the spring of her junior year, Samantha joined Professor McElwee-White’s lab in organometallic research. Her specific project aims to design and synthesize a new gold precursor for applications in focused electron beam induced deposition. Samantha is also the vice president of her professional chemistry fraternity, Alpha Chi Sigma. Beyond academics, Samantha enjoys reading, cooking, and playing with her cat. She pursued a minor in English because aside from her chemistry classes, she enjoys engaging in discussions with her peers over different genres of literature. After she graduates, Samantha plans to pursue a PhD in Chemistry with a focus on synthetic organometallic chemistry. She hopes to continue research in academia so that she may address important synthetic issues such as C-H functionalization.
Victor Suarez is working towards a degree in Chemistry. He began engaging with research in Dr. Valeria D. Klieman’s group as an undergraduate in the Spring of 2019. The research effort sought to study the ultrafast excited-state dynamics of the organic dye merocyanine-540 through two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES). Victor’s objective in the project was to extract additional information on solvation and excited-state dynamics from the experimental data through computational simulation. He had the opportunity to deliver a poster presentation on his research at SERMACS 2021. After graduating, Victor plans to research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Spring of 2022 to study the relativistic behavior of particles form THz laser interactions. In addition to Chemistry, Victor enjoys learning Japanese and playing piano. He plans to continue with Chemistry into graduate school in the Fall of 2022 with a focus on the development of new computational methods.
Females in Mass Spectrometry Empowerment Award
Dr. Kamat, in MSREC, has won the “Females in Mass Spectrometry Empowerment Award”. This award helps offset conference attendance costs of females in mass spec fields of research.
