Harshani Rathnaweera, a UGA Chemistry graduate student in the Salguero laboratory, was one of the Materials Research Society’s “Best Poster Winners” at the 2020 Virtual Fall Meeting. Her poster “2D Nanostructured Tetrasilicates with Cr(II) and Cr(II)/Fe(II) in Square-Planar Coordination” described her research on the synthesis, crystal growth, properties, and nanostructuring of metal chromium tetrasilicate materials ACrSi₄O₁₀ (A = Ca, Sr, Ba) with interesting magnetic properties.

Laser desorption time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LD-ToF-MS) experiments on pressed-pellet samples of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) produce covalently-bonded dimers at masses (m/z) of 2M-2 and 2M-4 (where M is the parent mass). Through replication of these LD-ToF-MS conditions at higher throughput, PAH dimers have been produced and collected in milligram quantities. For collected samples of pyrene, perylene, and coronene, differential sublimation has isolated the dimer sample from residual monome

In the past, catalyst design has been highly characterized by trial and error based on previous experience and knowledge of catalysis.¹ Due to the number of variables involved in catalyst performance, it is difficult to manually optimize highly active catalysts. In the past few years, there has been a movement toward the use of machine learning as a tool in experimental catalyst design.

Accurately characterizing the structure of molecules is a fundamental goal for chemists. Many powerful techniques exist to do so (e.g. NMR, IR Spectroscopy, X-ray Crystallography, etc.) and have proven themselves to be extremely effective. However, there are certain cases where these standard ensemble methods struggle to characterize certain systems. In 1986, Binning and coworkers developed Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) as a complementary method to these traditional techniques.

An externally corrected coupled cluster (CC) ¹ method, where an adaptive configuration interaction (ACI) ^2,3 wave function provides the external cluster amplitudes, named ACI-CC, was presented. By exploiting the connection between configuration interaction and coupled cluster through cluster analysis, the higher-order T₃ and T₄ terms obtained from ACI are used to augment the T₁ and T₂ amplitude equations from traditional coupled cluster.

The interactions between gaseous SO₂ and the surface of water droplets have been studied extensively over the years due to the environmental impacts of aerosols. Spectroscopic methods including vibrational sum-frequency spectroscopy (VSFS) have been used to better understand the mechanism in which gaseous SO₂ reacts and dissolves on a water droplet surface^1-3. A weakly bonded SO₂:H₂O complex on the surface of water droplets has been observed before dissolution using VSFS¹.

Dr. Gregory Robinson, UGA Foundation Professor of Chemistry, is the lead faculty member coordinating the University of Georgia's participation in a comprehensive effort to increase faculty diversity and the use of inclusive teaching practices in STEM fields. Robinson is part of a team composed of UGA faculty, staff, and administrators working with the IChange Network to spearhead this initiative.

This 2020-2021 academic year serves as the inaugural year for the First-Year Peer Mentoring Program coordinated by both the Department of Chemistry and the Chemistry Graduate Student Organization (CGSO).  This program was designed to help integrate and acclimate incoming first-year chemistry graduate students to a graduate career in the UGA Chemistry Department. It aims to serve first-year students primarily in three areas: graduate coursework, teaching assistantships, and selection of a research group/PhD committee.

Doped or functionalized silica thin films are highly desirable technologies for many chemical applications. Current procedures for doping can be costly, environmentally unfriendly, require many synthetic steps, or have low doping efficiency. Kinetic doping is a technique for loading guest molecules into sol-gel thin films that involves introducing guest molecules into a still-evolving film, allowing them to be entrapped by the growing silica network developed by the Yip lab.