Distinguished Professor George Christou’s group has published three papers in Nature journals during the fall semester. They are the initial publications from three new directions in his program. Two are in ‘molecular nanoscience’ projects targeting bottom-up syntheses of monodisperse nanoparticles of important metal oxides: “Molecular analogue of the perovskite repeating unit and evidence for direct MnIII-CeIV-MnIII exchange coupling pathway”, A. E. Thuijs et al., Nature Commun. 2017, 8, 500 (doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00642-0); “Atomically-precise colloidal nanoparticles of cerium dioxide”, K. J. Mitchell et al., Nature Commun. 2017, 8, 1445 (doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01672-4). They were based on work by graduate students Annaliese Thuijs (now at Intel Corp.) and Kylie Mitchell (now at Innophos Inc.), respectively. The third is in a bioinorganic project to develop structural and functional models of the oxygen-evolving complex (OEC) in plant and cyanobacterial photosynthesis: “A bioinspired soluble manganese cluster as a water oxidation electrocatalyst with low overpotential”, G. Maayan et al., Nature Catalysis, online article doi:10.1038/s41929-017-0004-2, with his postdoc Galia Maayan (now Assistant Professor at the Technion, Israel).
Prof. Christou’s research is in synthetic and physical-inorganic chemistry of the transition metals, and spans molecular nanoscience, bioinorganic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, and molecular magnetism.