Tags: Departmental Colloquium


Complex Natural Products As A Driving Force for Discovery in Organic Chemistry

Our laboratory is deeply interested in the discovery and development of new reactionmethodology en route to the chemical synthesis of complex bioactive molecules. Over the courseof many years, research in our group at the California Institute of Technology has been pursued inthe general area of synthetic chemistry, with a focus on the development of new strategies for thepreparation of complex molecules. Concurrent to this program of target…


Harnessing the Potential of Metal Chalcogenide van der Waals Materials


A Golden Time for Nanotechnology

Gold nanocrystals of controlled size and shape have tunable optical properties that enable new science.  Upon illumination with resonant light, these gold nanocrystals can not only scatter light but also generate plasmons (coherent oscillations of conduction band electrons).  These plasmons, in turn, can produce local electric fields and heat.  All these modalities mean that gold nanocrystals can serve as excellent contrast and…


London Dispersion in Molecular Chemistry[1]

1 Institute of Organic Chemistry, Justus Liebig University, Heinrich-Buff-Ring 17, 35392 Giessen, Germany; e-mail: prs@uni-giessen.de; www.uni-giessen.de/schreiner  Keywords: catalysis • chemical bonding • noncovalent interactions  The Gecko can walk up a glass window because of the adhesion in hydrophobic setae on its toes that convey van der Waals (vdW) interactions with the surface. [2] and in catalysis.[7]  The and in…


New Windows Into The Secret Lives of Cells

From the 17th through the 19th century, beautifully artistic drawings of living specimens were inextricably linked to biological discovery. However, for much of the 20th century, optical microscopy took a back seat to the powerful new fields of genetics and biochemistry. Starting in the 1980s, the tables started to turn again, thanks to the widespread availability of computers, lasers, sensitive detectors, and fluorescence labeling techniques.…


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…
Subscribe to Departmental Colloquium