AmericanChemicalSociety.com

PRF narrative report 2010

The PRF funding has allowed me to hire two undergraduate students.  The students have worked full-time during the summer.  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 cyclopentane, cyclopentane-d₁₀, n-pentane and n-pentane-d₁₂.  The worked has been submitted for publication.  The other student worked on the properties of liquid methanol, trying to understand how the molecular interactions affect the optical properties.

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 one student to attend the 93^rd Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition, held May 2010 in Toronto, 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.  The student also presented his work at the Atlantic Chemistry Conference, held in May 2010 at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, NS.  He was awarded “Best undergraduate poster” in the physical chemistry division.