AmericanChemicalSociety.com

The PRF funding has allowed me to hire two undergraduate students.  The students have worked full-time during the summer and one worked part-time during the academic school year.  One student was a junior and the other was a senior.  Both gained valuable experience with the operation of state-of-the-art Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometers, as well as with aspects of simulations using computational chemistry software packages.

One student worked on the experimental measurement of the optical properties of liquid cyclohexane, heptane and octane while the student worked on the experimental measurement of the optical properties of liquid cyclopentane, cyclopentane-d₁₀, n-pentane and n-pentane-d₁₂.  The cyclohexane results have been published and the other results are currently in preparation.  Work has also been started on acetic acid pyridine complexes.

One student has completed her B.Sc. degree and has started MSc studies at Dalhousie University, Halifax NS and the other student is continuing his undergraduate studies at CBU and will continue to work on this project next summer.  The work of my research group was featured in a promotional video prepared by CBU as part of the recently announced $20 million capital project for a new Energy, Environment and Sustainability research center at CBU.

All of these subprojects have advanced our knowledge of how important weak intermolecular interactions are to the structure and properties of even nonpolar simple hydrocarbons.  Work will continue over the next couple of years.

 The PRF funding, also allowed me and two students to attend the 92^st Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition, held May 2009 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where some of results of this project were presented.  Not only did this give exposure to our work but very good feedback was received during the discussion of the work and as a result a couple of innovative areas of investigation in this project will be explored over the coming years.