There has been growing interest to drive chemical reactions via the direct use of renewable electricity to address sustainability challenges. The success of the approach rests on the use of the right materials to efficiently catalyze electrochemical reactions. Thus, there have been intense efforts to engineer catalyst materials whose surface contains the desired active sites. Despite the success, there is still much room for improvement in the field of electrocatalysis.

UGA Department of Chemistry Ph.D. Candidate Lily Birx recently received a 2022 Campus Sustainability Grant from the Office of Sustainability for her project "Full Circle: Minimization & Diversion of Waste in UGA Research Laboratories." As a researcher in Dr. Ron Orlando’s lab in the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC), Lily has diverted and reduced the lab’s waste by 85% while working with UGA Green Labs.

Department of Chemistry professor Dr. Vladimir Popik is one of three UGA faculty recently selected as a 2022 Senior Member by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists and administrators with success in patents, licensing and commercialization and have produced technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society.

Solid-state materials chemistry focuses on metals and cationic substitutions, particularly those in oxide ceramics. Relative to oxides, chalcogenides and mixed anion systems have been relatively underexplored. The Macaluso Research Group aims to uncover the structural and electronic role of Groups 16 and 17 elements in solid-state materials. We employ laboratory X-ray diffraction, synchrotron and neutron scattering to elucidate local and average crystal structures.

Dr. Kelly M. Hines, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, was recently featured as an "Emerging Investigator" by the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (JASMS).

Single-crystalline materials play a crucial role in the modern semiconductor electronics industry and fundamental science. The ability to grow large single crystals with high purity and low concentration of defects allows us to build new types of devices such as high-resolution semiconductor radiation detectors. Another important application of crystals is fundamental research, where crystal growth enables rapid screening of phase diagrams, structure determination and property characterization of new compounds.

Chemical modifications combined with mass spectrometry have been extensively used for identification and quantification of compounds of interest. Applications range from sample derivatization to the use of bioconjugation and chemical probes of protein structure. The Webb Lab uses solution and gaseous chemistries to facilitate the identification of compounds and their three-dimensional structures.

The Many-Body Expansion (MBE) of the energy of a chemical system is a powerful tool that encodes physical descriptors of cooperative effects in chemical systems. Depending on the definition of what a “body” is, the expansion can be applied to a wide variety of chemical ensembles.

Butyl radicals (n-, s-, i-, and tert-butyl) are formed from the pyrolysis of nitrite or azo- precursors. The radicals are doped into a beam of liquid helium droplets and probed with infrared action spectroscopy from 2700−3125 cm-1, allowing for a low temperature measurement of the CH stretching region. The presence of anharmonic resonance polyads in the 2800 − 3000 cm-1 region complicates its interpretation.