Tags: Departmental Colloquium


Frequency Combs as the Route to the Spectroscopic Trifecta: High Time Resolution, High Frequency Resolution, and High Sensitivity

Many consequential chemical processes take place on ultrafast timescales, including molecular vibrations and bond breaking. Measurements that follow ultrafast molecular dynamics in real time are changing our understanding of these processes. We are designing new tools to study ultrafast molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics with the sensitivity enough to study the molecules in molecular beams and the spectral resolution sufficient for…


Multi-Dimensional Separations for Bacteria Identifications and Investigations of Antimicrobial Resistance

Bacterial infections are a major global health concern, with an estimated 1 in 8 deaths attributed to bacterial infections in 2019 alone. When a patient with a suspected infection arrives in a clinical setting, the first step to developing a treatment strategy is to identify the causative pathogen, followed by determination of antimicrobial therapeutics that are appropriate and effective. The challenge for both these essential steps is the…


Making Sense of Reaction Mechanisms: Developing Assessment Tools for the Learning of Organic Chemistry

Reasoning about underlying mechanisms of observed chemical phenomena lies at the core of scientific practices.1 To prepare for work as scientists and engineers, students should engage in scientific and engineering practices such as developing and using models to predict and explain phenomena, and constructing arguments from evidence.1-5 One way to engage students in these practices is through three-dimensional (3D) learning; 3D assessments…


Characterizing Students’ Engagement with Empirical Data

Engaging learners in science practices and sensemaking exposes learners to the uncertainty inherent in science and gives them opportunities to ‘practice’ the practices. I have accomplished this in two ways. The first way is by embedding these practices in assessments and class discourse. Class activities and assessments offer students experimental data and prompt them to generate and evaluate models, explanations, and arguments. For example,…


Research Seminar: Dr. Emmanuel Echeverri-Jimenez

Dr. Echeverri-Jiménez is a candidate for the newly created tenure-track faculty position in Chemical Education as part of the President’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Hiring Initiative in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Echeverri-Jiménez has a Ph.D. in Chemistry Education from North Carolina State University and a Masters in Organic Synthesis and Computational Chemistry from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He is a…


Guest Speaker: Dr. Andrey Zakharchenko

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Heart valve disease is life-threatening in which heart valves do not function properly. Surgery is required to repair or replace the damaged valve for severe valve disease. Bioprosthetic heart valves are made from animal-derived materials, such as bovine pericardium (BP) or porcine heart valves, often work for many years in adults. However, when used in children, they tend to fail as…


A Hitchhiker’s Guide to High-Accuracy Computational Quantum Chemistry for Hydrogen Bonding, Halogen Bonding and other Non-Covalent Interactions

The subjects of solvation, molecular recognition and supramolecular self-assembly provide some of the motivation and impetus for the work that is the focus of the talk. Convergent approaches to quantum mechanical (QM) ab initio electronic structure calculations have provided tremendous insight into the structures, energetics and spectroscopic signatures of molecular clusters held together by relatively weak, non-covalent interactions (London…


2023 Alumni Lecture

Our 2023 Alumni Lecture speaker, Dr. Stefanie Milam, is a Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and serves as the James Webb Space Telescope Deputy Project Scientist for Planetary Science. She works in the Astrochemistry Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and is an expert in rotational spectroscopy, observations, and laboratory modeling of astrochemistry and molecular astrophysics of…


Chemical and Physical Properties of Surfactants in Seawater and Aerosol Particles and Their Influence on Particle Hygroscopic Growth

The size and composition of atmospheric aerosol particles modulate their interactions with solar radiation, and thus their influence on climate and visibility. The radiative effects of aerosol particles remain a large uncertainty in accurately modeling and predicting current and future climates. Recent work has demonstrated the presence of organic surfactant molecules in atmospheric aerosol particles, and their sources and transformations in the…


From Molecular Gyroscopes to Homeomorphic Isomerization: Molecules that Turn Themselves Inside-Out

Children never cease to be fascinated by toy gyroscopes, which commonly consist of (1) a rotating axis and disk, and (2) two to four spokes that connect the termini of the axis. This talk will describe syntheses of molecules that duplicate the connectivity, symmetry, and rotational ability of such gyroscopes. Complexes with trans R3P-MLn -PR3 linkages are first prepared, with R groups that terminate with a CH=CH2 moiety. Then alkene metathesis…
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