I have a research advisor!

Finally! Yesterday I found out that I was assigned to my first preference chemical research project advisor, Professor Abrahams! YAY!

Today before class I met with him to discuss the project. He has recently been doing work on coordination polymers that produce stacking sheets. What is cool about these sheets is that they separate slightly upon carbon dioxide uptake. When I initially met with Professor Abrahams before, he mentioned that some of his systems had application to gas absorption/storage. I really liked this because my previous research had been focused on actually generating gases like hydrogen and carbon dioxide (from formic acid). The work he described at Melbourne seemed to be a nice extension of what I had been doing previously.

In the unpublished paper we discussed, there were many different variants of the initial sheet he had shown me. My project will focus on examining in more detail one of the variations. Using a specific reagent, we can get a sheet that has different sized gaps in it (as opposed to uniformly sized holes). What is really cool about this system is that the sheets interpenetrate each other, meaning that one set of parallel sheets is perpendicularly interlaced between another set of parallel sheets. While you would think that the sheets would be interlaced through the larger holes, they are actually interlaced through the smaller holes. This is because the larger holes have oxygen atoms that interact with water and other cations.

All that being said, I suppose the goal of the project is to see what we can really do with these kinds of structures. How can we change and modify them? What kinds of cations and solvents can we coordinate in these networks? I’ve never worked before with supramolecular structures before (these things are enormous!), so I’m excited to see how the project goes. I’m also really excited to get some crystals and do some x-ray diffraction!

I’ll update you after my first day on Monday!

Stephanie