We are pleased to share that Todd Austell, teaching professor and associate director of undergraduate studies and Frank Leibfarth, assistant professor of chemistry, earned 2021 University Teaching Awards!

North Carolina native and organic chemist Sidney Wilkerson-Hill is investigating ways to recreate the power of plants in the lab — work that could lead to advances in drug development.

The Department of Chemistry wishes you a happy and healthy holiday season. View holiday video message from department members.

Kate Vannoy is a recipient of a Department of Justice fellowship. She is looking forward to working on her research project with the goal of producing a cost-effective electrochemical sensor that is capable of simultaneous, in-field quantification of trace amounts of illicit drugs in solvated powder and saliva. 

In this Commemorative Issue of Liquid Crystals, former collaborators and contemporaries express their admiration of Zeev Luz’s legacy with an array of invited articles spanning a range of topics at the intersection of magnetic resonance with ordered fluid phases.

This review focuses on applications of ALD in DSPECs for the preparation of solar fuels based on modified semiconductor surfaces. In this area, ALD has been used to prepare core/shell structures that modify surface-interfacial electron transfer, to prepare structures that stabilize surface-bound chromophores and catalysts, and for the preparation of overlayer structures that stabilize electrodes for water oxidation and photocathodes for H-2 or CO2 reduction.

The kinetics of grafting-through polymerization of PDMS11MA macromonomers was studied to establish correlations between reversible first-order kinetic trends and network mechanical properties. By varying the reaction conditions, including the initial monomer concentration, targeted degree of polymerization, and solvent, the syntheses of macroinitiators and chain extensions were optimized with improved chain-end fidelity while maintaining a high yield and provided elastomers with consistent desired mechanical properties.

Hemilabile ligands are found in many leading organometallic catalysts, but it can be challenging to tune the degree of hemilability in a particular catalyst. This work explores the impact of cation-tunable hemilability on the speciation of iridium(III) pincer-crown ether catalysts during high-activity olefin isomerization.