“I like chemistry because I feel that the subject applies to everyday life,” said Jordan. “I want to make a positive impact on others through my research, and I thought that pursuing a PhD in chemistry would enable me to do this. What I enjoy most about my project is that I can directly apply my work to drug discovery, and I hope the science I am developing now will one day lead to a new class of medicines.”
As the subject of this Graduate Student Spotlight, Jordan shares something that was common in his childhood but will seem strange to future generations, the most famous people he’s met, the funniest show he’s seen, and more.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Chemistry located at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 invites applications for a tenure-track position at the assistant professor level beginning July 1, 2027 or thereafter. Outstanding applicants with research interests in all areas of chemistry, broadly defined, are encouraged to apply. Faculty duties include classroom teaching in Chemistry at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Appointments are at the rank of assistant professor, but outstanding senior applicants may be considered. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. in chemistry or a related field by the start of employment and must demonstrate ability to excel in teaching.
The Department of Chemistry provides a welcoming and supportive environment for exceptional science, teaching, mentorship, and service. We seek candidates who embody our core values of respect, well-being, inclusivity, and integrity. We believe that education and research are at their finest when they include and appreciate the experiences of people of all backgrounds.
Required application materials include: CV, teaching statement, three research proposals, an executive summary of research plans, a broader impacts statement (which can cover topics related to teaching and educational efforts, mentoring, outreach, and/or service to the community), and at least three outside letters of recommendation.
Applications are being accepted at Academic Jobs Online.
To receive full consideration, completed applications must be received by October 1, 2026.
Pay range for a 9-month academic appointment at the Assistant Professor rank: $143,200 – $154,000.
MIT provides pay ranges representing its good faith estimate of what the Institute reasonably expects to pay for a position at the time of posting. The pay offered to a selected candidate during hiring will be based on factors such as (but not limited to) the scope and responsibilities of the position, the candidate’s work experience and education/training, internal peer equity, and applicable legal requirements. This pay range represents base pay only and does not include any other benefits or compensation.
MIT is an equal opportunity employer. We strongly encourage applications from individuals from all identities and backgrounds. All qualified applicants will receive equitable consideration for employment based on their experience and qualifications and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, or national or ethnic origin. View MIT Policy on Non Discrimination and EEOC’s Know Your Rights. Employment is contingent upon the completion of a satisfactory background check, including possible verification of any findings of misconduct (or pending investigations) from prior employers.
]]>Abigail Chapman
Xinnuo Chen
Martin Chujfi
Cole English
Amanda Gin
Tierani Green
Stephanie Halim
Yuxin Huang
Constantine Kyprianou
Chu Luo
Alvin Meng
Micah Miles
Alexander Mueller
Kiarra Ning
Matthew Ong
Diana Tymochko
August Vitarbo
Dalaney Westbroek
Luke Zhou
Sunny Tang
Dr. Gabi Wenzel
Dr. Shuo Zhang
Dr. Saptarshi Mandal
Dr. Jonas Rein
Minsik Cho
Kwangwook Ko
Dangliang Liu
Chonghe Zhang
Dr. Aditi Dixit
Nina Greeley
Dr. Kubra Kaygisiz
Carina Luo
Omar Salinas
Jennifer Pierre-Louis
]]>Wang joined the Department of Chemistry and the Broad Institute in 2019 and earned tenure in 2024. As the recipient of the Eli Lilly Award, she will be honored as the featured speaker at a symposium held during the Spring 2027 ACS National Meeting.
The Wang Lab develops and applies state-of-the-art tools across chemistry, biophysics, and genomics to map the brain from molecules to systems. Specifically, using in situ sequencing of nucleic acids as a core approach, Wang aims to develop high-resolution, highly multiplexed molecular imaging methods across multiple scales to better understand the physical and chemical basis of brain wiring and function.
]]>Radosevich, who joined the Department of Chemistry in 2016, was honored for discovering new reaction pathways and organocatalysts featuring biphilic phosphorus (P) compounds that operate through P(III)/P(V) redox cycling. Research in the Radosevich group centers on inventing new homogeneous catalysts and reagents derived from inexpensive, earth-abundant p-block elements.
Wendlandt joined the Department of Chemistry in 2018 and was honored for developing light-driven methods for stereochemical editing and their synthetic applications. Her research focuses on developing selective, catalytic reactions using the tools of organic and organometallic synthesis alongside physical organic chemistry.
Recipients of the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards will be honored at the Fall 2026 meeting of the American Chemical Society.
]]>The traditional way of making ammonia, in use for more than a century and accounting for the vast majority of production, is the Haber-Bosch process, which relies on fossil fuels to provide the needed heat. Hydrogen used in the process is also largely produced from fossil fuels.
There is another way, using electrochemistry instead of heat and pressure, but so far this method has not been anywhere near economically competitive at the scales needed.
Now, researchers at MIT have developed a way to predict which materials could be most promising as catalysts in electrochemical ammonia production. Catalysts help drive chemical reactions, and their properties determine how efficiently those reactions proceed. Rather than using trial and error to test each possible combination out of the millions of possible alloys — which can take years — the new approach could greatly speed up the search for materials that could make this low-emissions method competitive with the Haber-Bosch process.
“Our approach identifies the key physical properties that drive catalytic activity in ammonia production,” says Bilge Yildiz, the Breen M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). The results can guide the search for new and more effective catalyst compounds.
The open-access findings were published Aug. 11 in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal EES Catalysis, in a paper by Yildiz and doctoral students Constantine Athanitis of DMSE and Filip Grajkowski of the Department of Chemistry.
The challenge of greener ammonia
As the world’s population grows, Athanitis says, “we’re just going to need more and more food, and the only reason why we’re able to sustain so many people is because of fertilizer.” But more than 90 percent of the ammonia needed for fertilizer is still made by that energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process, which “has been hyper-optimized since it first came out more than a century ago,” he says.
“If we’re trying to keep in line with society’s sustainability and energy targets and climate change targets, we really need to come up with another alternative,” he explains. The world currently uses about 200 million metric tons of ammonia each year, “so ideally we want to be able to find a way to produce the same amount of ammonia, or even more, but in a more energy-efficient way and also with lower CO2 emissions,” he says.
Using electricity to produce ammonia is not a new idea. “It’s really just the electrochemical reaction between proton-electron pairs and nitrogen gas. And these technologies exist,” he says. The approach uses the same basic principles as electrolyzers, which use electricity to drive chemical reactions in devices.
But while the process works, it’s not efficient enough for industrial-scale production. “Production rates and yields are still too low,” Athanitis says. “Even though a technology might be better for the world or for the climate, companies and capitalism won’t really allow it unless it’s cost competitive.”
How to make it more competitive? The key ingredient in the electrochemical process is a metallic catalyst, whose properties govern the reaction that takes place on its surface. “If we can somehow find a catalyst that reduces the energy needed and is more selective for ammonia production,” Athanitis says, “then we could essentially hit the jackpot.” A more selective catalyst would produce more ammonia while reducing unwanted side reactions.
Finding better catalysts
But finding that ideal catalyst is not simply a matter of identifying one perfect material. Different materials can improve different parts of the reaction, and researchers are seeking combinations that can make ammonia production efficient, affordable, and practical at large scale.
“Metal nitride compounds make an ideal material system for this reaction and for identifying the electronic, chemical, and structural properties that determine reactivity in nitrogen reduction and ammonia electrosynthesis,” Yildiz says.
Transition metals could form promising nitride alloys for this purpose, and historically, “materials research has been pretty much trial and error,” Athanitis says.
The usual process is to take some existing material and “tweak it in some way,” he says. “It’s all somewhat guided by scientific and chemical intuition.”
Now, increasingly, computational tools are being used to model the physical interactions and predict outcomes. A method called density functional theory uses quantum mechanics to simulate the properties and behavior of materials, allowing researchers to predict how different atomic arrangements may perform before making them in the lab. Rather than searching randomly through every possible alloy combination, Yildiz says, “we first assessed what microscopic properties of the material make them tick for nitrogen reduction.”
For ammonia-producing catalysts, “we’re looking at transition metal nitrides,” Athanitis says, because they have been found to be effective in these electrochemical nitrogen reactions. They are especially effective because “the nitrogen inherent to the catalyst itself becomes part of the reaction.”
This produces a series of chemical steps in which one step provides part of the energy needed to drive the next, reducing the amount of input energy needed. This helps solve one of the major bottlenecks in the nitrogen reduction reaction: the high energy required to break the strong bonds in nitrogen molecules, he says.
But the process is far from perfect, Athanitis says. It is “still limited by certain steps throughout the reaction pathway, including nitrogen dissociation and hydrogen transfer.” The study attempted to identify those bottlenecks and, with the help of machine learning, determine which alloys of these metals might overcome them.
With that understanding, “it can give us insights and open up potential strategies for how we can tune these materials to create next-generation better nitride catalysts,” Athanitis says.
Pushing past theory
The approach is “exciting work” that could help develop a foundation for designing new catalysts for ammonia production, says Dane Morgan, a professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in this study.
“This work helps clarify how fundamental electronic properties of a material relate to its role as a catalyst in making ammonia,” Morgan says. “Such understanding can help guide researchers in designing new catalysts, both through better qualitative understanding and by accelerating computational screening.”
So far, the study is purely theoretical: The researchers have used computer models to identify promising alloys, but those materials still need to be made and tested. Morgan notes that “translating these calculations into practical catalysts will require many additional steps, so meaningful real-world impact is likely still some distance away.”
The next step will be to build a working reaction cell, a laboratory device that uses the catalyst to produce ammonia and test its performance under real operating conditions. “For this to really make an impact in society, we need to bring it to the experimental lab,” Athanitis says.
“There have always been pushes at the frontiers of what’s possible,” he adds. “We like to think we’ve pushed the boundary of candidate materials here beyond what was thought of before, and hopefully we’re almost there. But even if we’re not almost there, we’re still pushing in the right direction.”
]]>Expected to provide $18 million in research funding over six years, the award brings together 16 research groups from nine departments across four institutions, including five MIT departments, three collaborating universities, and a teaching hospital. The award is pending MIT’s negotiation of a formal research agreement with the NSF.
The MIT Materials Research Science and Engineering Center will be directed by Associate Professor Rafael Jaramillo of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), with Professor Caroline Ross of DMSE serving as associate director. The center will be housed administratively within the MIT Materials Research Laboratory.
The center will have two main research thrusts. One will engineer specialized materials to advance X-ray detectors used in medical imaging, potentially leading to better cancer diagnosis, lower radiation exposure, and improved industrial and security imaging. The other will explore high-temperature sulfur-based molten materials to transform how metals and semiconductors are made, opening a path to more efficient metal production, improved access to critical materials, and new thin-film semiconductor technologies.
The expected funding will also support a new shared laboratory for testing magnetic materials and materials under extreme conditions, managed by MIT.nano. This facility will be available to academic and industry users, expanding the nationwide portfolio of NSF-supported research facilities.
“The long-term goal is for the broader materials and engineering community to see the disruptive potential of bringing researchers together across disciplines to solve complex challenges,” says Jaramillo, the Stavros V. Salapatas Career Development Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “And that includes specifically in medical diagnostics and metals production, where entirely new things will be possible that aren’t considered possible today.”
A legacy of collaboration
The selection of MIT’s MRSEC is part of a $108 million NSF investment in six research centers that will explore a range of topics, including artificial intelligence-driven experimental laboratories and hybrid quantum materials that combine light and matter. NSF’s MRSEC program brings together interdisciplinary teams of researchers to push the boundaries of materials science and engineering and tackle complex scientific challenges.
The MIT center builds on nearly 60 years of interdisciplinary materials research at the Institute, extending a legacy that began with U.S. Department of Defense-supported laboratories in the 1960s and continued through NSF-funded centers in subsequent decades. Past MRSEC investments helped build research communities that enabled MIT centers of excellence such as the MIT Microphotonics Center and the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.
“We were inspired to continue that legacy of collaborative research in materials science,” Jaramillo says. “It’s mainly the mode of working — the mode of working in a very intentional way as a team across disciplinary boundaries and having this program that brings people together.”
MIT departments involved in the MRSEC include DMSE; Chemistry; Chemical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); and Physics. Collaborating institutions identified in the MRSEC proposal are Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The first research group will focus on re-engineering scintillators — materials that convert X-rays into visible light — at the nanoscale, with the goal of improving resolution, speed, and energy sensitivity.
“My vision for that is really Marin and JJ’s vision. So I’m basically cheerleading for them,” Jaramillo says, referring to optical materials experts Professor Marin Soljačić of Physics and Professor Juejun Hu of DMSE, who are expected to lead the effort.
The second group is closer to Jaramillo’s own research in semiconductor and advanced electronic materials. It seeks to develop a deeper understanding of high-temperature sulfur-based liquids to improve the yield and efficiency of producing critical metals such as copper. Expertise in these types of materials has become increasingly rare in U.S. academia, Jaramillo says, and one goal of the center is to rebuild that capability at MIT. “I’m very excited about that being a new intellectual center of gravity.”
Telling stories about materials
Beyond research, the center is also expected to develop outreach activities highlighting the importance of materials science in society, particularly in the Boston region, where Jaramillo said industries need more workers with backgrounds in materials processing.
“For example, our community colleges don’t offer it,” Jaramillo says. “If you were looking at a community college in Michigan, everyone would know what materials science is.”
One initiative, DISASTER! — “with all caps and an exclamation mark,” Jaramillo says — will tell stories of real-world catastrophes and the materials failures that contributed to them.
A major part of materials science over the last century has been understanding why things fail, Jaramillo says. “It’s also a tremendous foot in the door for introducing the field. Because frankly, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ If you have giant disasters, then suddenly people are like, ‘Why did the bridge fail?’”
The program will encourage MIT undergraduates to research and tell these stories, illustrating how forensic materials science has helped prevent future failures.
Among the examples Jaramillo cited are the rivets used to assemble the RMS Titanic, whose impurities made the rivets more brittle in the freezing North Atlantic, and the crashes of the world’s first commercial jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, which revealed the dangers of metal fatigue.
“There are so many other stories that need to be told around how a material failed,” Jaramillo said. “It really cost people money and time and lives. And then through forensic materials science, we understood why it failed and we avoided future failures.”
The MRSEC team is planning to stage public outreach events at the MIT Future Fest.
Looking ahead six years, Jaramillo hopes the center will have become a self-sustaining hub for materials research.
“I hope that we will have rebuilt the muscle memory to come together in an interdisciplinary way around materials science, and that it should have a bit of a self-sustaining element to it. I hope that we then compete successfully for the next center, and lay the groundwork for the next 60 years.”
MIT Research Administration Services supported the MRSEC proposal development through its Research Development team, which specializes in providing substantive assistance for large and complex research proposals, and in supporting early-career faculty.
MIT faculty expected to be involved in the MRSEC are Rafael Jaramillo, Caroline Ross, Juejun Hu, and Antoine Allanore of DMSE; Moungi Bawendi of Chemistry; Martin Bazant of Chemical Engineering; Nicole Nie and Shuhei Ono of EAPS; and Marin Soljačić, Riccardo Comin, Nuh Gedik, and Long Ju of Physics.
]]>But integrating molecules into functional devices at scale remains a challenge. Traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes can damage small and fragile molecular materials. Now, MIT researchers have developed a scalable fabrication technique that incorporates delicate molecular materials into electronic devices on a chip without causing damage.
Their method extends the capabilities of standard semiconductor manufacturing processes to accommodate molecules. The researchers first prefabricate the device components using traditional processes. Then, they introduce the molecules and harness nanoscale surface forces to mechanically transform the fabricated device, which self-assembles without damaging the molecules.
The team demonstrated the robustness and scalability of their technique by fabricating more than 1,000 devices using sub-nanometer molecular layers.
“Our platform combines the scalability of conventional semiconductor manufacturing with the precision and control of self-assembly. This establishes a new fabrication framework for the scalable, high-throughput integration of emerging nanoscale and quantum materials, including molecules, into functional devices with architectures and capabilities that were previously infeasible,” says Farnaz Niroui, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and senior author of a new paper describing the work.
She is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Sarah Spector and Peter Satterthwaite, EECS graduate students; Jeremiah A. Johnson, the A. Thomas Guertin Professor of Chemistry at MIT; and others at MIT. The research appears today in Nature Nanotechnology.
Building with molecules
Molecules are small clusters of atoms with structures and chemistries that can be precisely designed. This allows their properties to be engineered across a wide design space.
Once integrated into device architectures, these molecules could enable next-generation electronics and computing platforms that are smaller, faster, and more adaptable, as well as higher-performance photonic devices and emerging quantum technologies.
To build a functional system, molecular building blocks need to be integrated with other device layers. In electronic systems, a critical step is making electrical contacts to the molecules by interfacing them with metallic surfaces. However, the harsh chemicals and processes needed for traditional chip manufacturing damages these fragile molecular materials, reducing reliability and performance.
To leverage the scalability of standard fabrication techniques while achieving the precision needed for handling molecules, the MIT researchers developed a decoupled, two-step approach.
They first fabricate all the device components using standard semiconductor manufacturing, then incorporate the molecular material after-the-fact to finish building the device.
“By bringing the delicate materials into the process only after we have fabricated the main device elements, it allows us to use conventional processes that are normally not compatible with these nanomaterials,” Satterthwaite says.
In their demonstration, the researchers fabricated a scaffold with two metal electrodes separated by a precisely sized gap. Then, they deposited the molecular layer on the electrode surfaces.
Finally, the researchers leverage nanoscale forces to gently pull the top electrode onto the molecules, forming the final device in a nondestructive way. This creates a self-aligned, damage-free electrical contact to the molecules.
Using the forces
While gravity is a dominant physical force that holds our world together, different forces dominate at the nanoscale. One, called the capillary force, causes liquid to get sucked into small spaces. (Plants rely on capillary forces to draw water into their stems.)
By carefully engineering the stiffness of the electrodes, when the solution containing the molecules evaporates, capillary forces gently pull the two metal surfaces together with the molecules sandwiched in between.
Once the two electrodes are in place, the researchers must hold them in a stable state. To do so, they rely on another nanoscale force known as the van der Waals force.
Van der Waals forces cause surfaces to attract one another. By controlling the device surface area and molecules properties, the researchers ensure these forces will be strong enough to hold the electrodes in a stable structure without damaging the molecules.
“Nanoscale forces play a critical role in our approach. Instead of fabricating exactly the structures we ultimately want, we make something mechanically mobile and use forces to transform it into an architecture that would otherwise be impossible to fabricate,” Spector explains.
They used this technique to fabricate more than 1,000 devices with molecular layers less than 1 nanometer thick. Even at this tiny scale, the fabricated chips comprised a high yield of working devices, 96 percent on average. The robust devices also endured tens of thousands of electrical cycles without showing any sign of degradation.
“The stability really stands out. This is a critical feature for moving molecular devices toward practical applications, but it has been a persistent challenge in the field,” Satterthwaite says.
Importantly, this versatile technique allows circuit- and system-level integration of molecular devices, pushing the field beyond the study of isolated devices, the researchers say. They demonstrated this by building an interconnected array of molecular memory devices which could have applications in next-generation computing platforms.
Their technique can also be extended to other materials and device architectures.
In the future, the researchers want to build on this platform to investigate and develop new classes of multifunctional computing and sensing devices and systems.
“By enabling the pristine integration of emerging molecular materials and other atomic-scale matter into functional devices at scale, our platform accelerates discovery and design of these materials with tailored functionalities and their deployment in emerging technologies,” Niroui adds.
This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the MathWorks Fellowship, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano facilities.
]]>There are three different classes of nitrogenases found in nitrogen-fixing microbes, which vary based on the types of metal that they contain. Nitrogenases that contain the metal molybdenum are the most efficient, and two new studies from MIT offer an explanation for why that is.
The findings could help guide the design of engineered enzymes or synthetic catalysts that can convert nitrogen gas to ammonia, the researchers say.
The team found that while molybdenum doesn’t directly bind to nitrogen, it helps nearby iron atoms bind to nitrogen more strongly. This is a critical first step in breaking the bond between the two nitrogen atoms that form nitrogen gas.
“It’s that initial binding step that’s really the hard part. Once you’ve started to break the nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond and make some new nitrogen-hydrogen bonds, it’s pretty easy to get the rest of the way,” says Daniel Suess, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a senior author of both papers.
MIT postdoc Tong Wu and former postdoc Madeleine Ehweiner are the lead authors of one of the papers, and Alexandra Brown PhD ’23 is the lead author of the other. Kyle Lancaster, a professor of chemistry at Cornell University, is a senior author of the latter paper, along with Suess. Both papers appear today in the journal Chem.
Efficient enzymes
Before microbes evolved the ability to fix nitrogen around 3 billion years ago, the strong triple bond between atoms of N2 could only be split with high-energy events such as a lightning strike.
“Once an enzyme came along that could convert dinitrogen to ammonia, that changed the game because now cells could harvest nitrogen from the air for biomass,” Suess says.
Within the active site of nitrogenase is a catalytic cofactor that typically consists of a cluster of iron, sulfur, carbon, and in some cases another metal. Nitrogenases whose cofactors contain molybdenum are the most efficient, followed by those containing the metal vanadium. Nitrogenases that don’t have any metal other than iron are the least efficient.
Why the molybdenum-containing enzyme is more efficient has been a puzzle, especially because it’s thought that molybdenum itself doesn’t bind directly to nitrogen gas.
“In all cases, iron is thought to interact with N2, so it’s a bit of a mystery,” Suess says. “If all the chemistry is happening at iron, why is it that this molybdenum is affecting catalysis?”
To answer that question, Suess’s lab has developed simpler versions of iron-sulfur clusters that they can use to model the naturally occurring cofactors. These can be modified by adding different metal atoms, allowing the researchers to study how those metals change the cofactors’ properties.
In the first paper, led by Wu and Ehweiner, the researchers swapped in different metal atoms and then measured the ability of the iron in the cofactor to bind to nitrogen. They found that only cofactors with a large metal atom, such as molybdenum or tungsten, were able to strongly bind N2. With vanadium, chromium, or iron, which are smaller, the cofactors did not bind N2 and performed other reactions instead.
“That paper essentially recapitulates what you see in biology, which is that the iron-sulfur clusters that have molybdenum in them seem to be better at binding dinitrogen than those with lighter metals,” Suess says.
Sharing electrons
In the second paper, led by Brown, the researchers uncovered a possible mechanism that explains that phenomenon.
In that paper, the researchers studied how cofactors containing different metals interact with compounds called N-heterocyclic carbenes. These molecules behave similarly to N2 in some ways, making them a good model for this type of study. Like N2, they are resistant to accepting any electrons from another molecule, which is an essential step to breaking chemical bonds.
The researchers found that when molybdenum was included in the cluster, it became easier for iron to donate some of its electrons to the N-heterocyclic carbenes, in a process known as back-bonding. This occurs because molybdenum, a large atom, has large orbitals that can overlap with the orbitals of the nearby iron atom. That alters iron’s electron density in ways that make it easier for iron to pass electrons to N2.
“Without these direct metal-metal interactions, the iron has to do all the work, but adding the molybdenum allows for this electronic cooperativity,” Suess says.
Once N2 is bound to an iron atom, the rest of the reaction can proceed. A proton can come in from water or another source to create an N-H bond, which then makes it much easier for the remaining N-N bonds to be broken and bind to protons, forming NH3.
The findings could help guide scientists who are working on designing enzymes that could be engineered into organisms that help them generate their own NH3, eliminating or reducing the need for fertilizer. The results could also help chemists to design synthetic catalysts that could produce ammonia industrially, using less energy than the Haber-Bosch process.
“The general principle is that you can make an iron site in any context behave differently when you have these metal-metal interactions than when you don’t have these interactions,” Suess says. “The primary result of these findings is to teach us about the natural world and how nature accomplishes this really important and miraculous reaction. And, maybe that can be translated into new processes.”
The research was funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
]]>“I chose to pursue a PhD in chemistry because I wanted to learn to think deeply about chemical problems and to develop the greater technical skills in synthetic chemistry,” said Gregory. “I hope that my development during the course of my degree will enable me to make more significant contributions towards the synthesis and discovery of new therapeutics.”
As the subject of this month’s Graduate Student Spotlight, Gregory shares the subject he could give a 40 minute presentation on with little preparation, the food he craves most often, the lineup for his ideal music festival, and more.
What game or movie universe would you most like to live in?
Star Trek would be the best place to live, hands down.
What would be the worst to live in?
The Mad Max universe would be the worst to live in.
If you were on a 27 hour flight and could only watch one movie, what would it be?
Redline. The movie is so intense that it has infinite rewartch value.