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0:00
Melissa Rochon: Alright, so welcome back everybody just 3:00pm hopefully you're here back here with us, we have Dr. Federico Rabuffetti here is from our inorganic division to go over some of the research that's happening here in the inorganic division, so thank you for your time. Federico: Okay well. First of all welcome all of you. It's a pleasure. To have the chance to interact with with you, these afternoon and, like the program says, this is a an overview
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and a question and answer session so. More than a presentation, it should be a conversation So if you want to interrupt, ask questions comments, or you have any doubts just interrupt me I only have six slides. It’d be nice to give you first an overview of what type of research, what areas of research, we do in doing organic division, what are the Faculty who are the faculty members, the funding sources, the type of instrumentation that we use. What
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type of journals you will be publishing and then what is the, what are the professional development opportunities once you get your once you get your PhD. I'll cover all that in six slides like I said, if you want, if you have any questions just interrupt me at any at any point. So the Inorganic Divison are formed by six Faculty, and here they are you know, in alphabetical order and we do record mostly all branches of inorganic
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chemistry in different flavors. But we go from molecules to crystals from films to nano materials from five very fundamental studies of reactivity and bonding to things that are more applied like catalyses or micro electronics and you know those areas we I think we we do very well and what i'm going to do now is go very briefly over the research that each one of us does in the inorganic deviation. So i'm going to get started with Matt. Matt does lanthanide based organometallic chemistry,
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and also bio-organic so in the in in this group there are two major lines of research, right now. One is the development of coordination complexes containing lanthanides for magnetic resonance imaging. So chemical sensing and, of course, developing the science behind the chemistry behind that sensing. So every time you have sensing agents are always barriers that need to be overcome in terms of sensitivity and response time and that's what that's what
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they do in Matt’s group. The other line of research, is the development of water-stable lantanide complexes for asymmetric catalysis. So there are a series of reactions that organic reactions are occurring solution and are catalyzed by lantnanide complexes and they tried to develop that type of catalysts using some of the knowledge they have acquired in the first line of research which is lanthanide complexes for MRI imaging. So they do a little
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bit of everything, including organic synthesis voltumetry, fluorescence, NMR so that type of that type of chemistry, is what they do there. Then I go to Stephanie. Stephanie is a materials person. So she does research on materials, and right now, most of the nano materials, and there are two major areas of focus of her research one is group 15 nano particles so Nitrides, phosphides, arsenides, and they want to develop new methods to put those to synthesize those particles those nanoparticles
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in a series of in such a way that they meet a series of conditions, for example in terms of polydispersity. Face purity and that's a synthetic challenge usually because those nanoparticles they tend to have a high degree of covalency so it's not that simple as just precipitating stuff stuff out and the end goal of making those nanoparticles is using them for energy relevant applications and as you're going to see energy is a theme that
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is across the guts all of all of our research areas, you know all of the routine inorganic chemistry, so they want to use that for for for area for applications like magnetic refrigeration and electro-catalytic water splitting. The second line of research is developing the knowledge on how to assemble nano particles that are, in principle, very different. So achieving examples of nano particles that can be used for energy relevant applications
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for example photovoltaics by learning how to put together very different components and that's a challenge in terms of developing that chemistry to bind these components into a functional architecture. Next, we have Stas Groysman. Stas is an organometallic Chemist and he does coordination chemistry mostly with transition metals, they also do bio inorganic chemistry, so there is always some application that there are applications that range from catylsis to things that are
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more related to metals in biology and the two main lines of research, there are gropu transfer chemistry between in Transition metal containing bimetallic complexs mostly three 3D bimetallic complexes. So groiup transfer is important in terms of things like catalysis. It's very important and you may have seen that in organic chemistry at some point during your bachelor. So it's a synthetic challenge. The second line of research is how to design
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redox-active ligands that can help to activate very small molecules that are in principle unreactive, for example, nitrogen. So that's that's important for things like like catalysis. Very important it's very challenging. So like you like you see here in this slide there are things that are more applied and things are an areas that are more fundamental.But, all in all of them what we do is like I said before, discovering new chemistry.
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Then, well, this is this is me. So I'm materials chemistry person, and we do a variety of materials from bulk crystals to nano materials to a high rate organic and organic materials and the two main lines of research are one is focusing towards lanthanide containing transitional material containing solids for luminescent thermometers that has a variety of applications from microelectronics to bio-sensing and also energy conversion. The second line of research
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is developing new families of materials and, in this case we are one of the lines of research, we are working on now is to develop new like metallic for any the precursors for to sit for the solution phase synthesis of fluorinated nanoparticles, for example, so we do have quite a few different chemistry email from this is very fundamental perspective so it's what I would go exploratory synthesis. And we have Caludio Verani. Claudio does coordination chemistry for the most part with transition
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metals iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and the end goal of Claudio’s research is to develop metal containing soft materials like metal surfactants or supramolecular assemblies. Those are ready for a variety of applications, one of which is energy conversion so atalysis, for example. And also corrosion mitigation, so I think they did I’m pretty sure they have a project on corrosion going on right now. The other line of research in Claudio’s
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group is designing molecular rectifiers. So redox-driven molecular switches for molecular electronic. So you know that molecules can be used to conduct electricity that was discovered back in the 70’s and they are, there was always a push to develop new molecular switches that's that's one of Claudio’s focuses. And then we have Chuck Winter. Chuck has, they do orgganometallic and organic synthesis. And the main major focus of their research in Chucks group is to design organometallic
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pecursors for atomic layer deposition of thin films that are relevant for microelectronics. So they want to learn how to tailor the chemistry of a given molecule so that when it sublimes inside of a reactor it subsequently deposits as a very high quality film. And they also do they do atomic layer deposition here too. Mostly off metal and metal nitrate films so a bit of inorganic and organomatellic chemistry there. This is molecular its not
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materials. The end is materials, but the chemistry itself is molecular chemistry. And these are some of the funding agencies that support our research. From all the slides that i've shown before, so we have federal funding, we also have corporations and we have industry funding these are some of the of the agencies and companies that support us. Collaborations, there are all sorts of collaboration opportunities in our groups.Inside
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the department at Wayne State and outside the department and outside the countries overseas we have got our agency in Spain, for example and in Italy. You know how research works are nowadays so it's impossible for one lab to everything, so the idea is that you are exposed to those collaborations. We also have industrial collaborations, BASF Cabbot and Applied Materials for those are some examples right. Question?
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You CO2 useful energy you? In my lab we don't do any sort any type of CO2 conversion and that's more along the lines of what Stas Groysman does. Next. So, in terms of instrumentation. Here, we have is at least a very brief list of the major pieces of equipment that we use and here I've listed only shared equipment, so we have our Lumigen instrument cetter, you probably got a tour of the Lumigen Center where we have two big shared instrumentation facilities. In the inorganic division, these
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are the major pieces of instrumentation, of shared instrumentationthat we use: diffractometers, NMR’s XPS, electron microscopes we just got funded for a new electron microscope that's good that's going to be operational in April or May, and then we use ICP MS analysis for elemental analysis. We are all of us do this, and theres also a quite a few of us who use facilities offered at national labs. Especially synchrotron sources and neutron sources to
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the structural analysis of crystal structures. So eventually you will be depending on what group you you choose you join you're going to be exposed to those techniques and you're going to get to travel to national labs. Some journals where we publish and I took some examples from the past four years. So these are very good journals they are top journals in the in the field, so I think we do, we do with research, solid. And in terms of where
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our alumni alumni go here I took the list from the past, I think, seven years, and you see where they go, so they go to industry, they also go to national labs or government organizations. Usually after doing post-doc and they also go to enter into education right from larger universities to smaller colleges, you know, four year colleges, but there is a variety there of places where our students end up going, so I think the US, you have
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a perspective of what the professional development opportunities are once you have your your PhD in your hands. Rhat's pretty much it I'll be happy to answer any questions. Student: All right, i'll go first i'm specifically about your research on the luminescent thermometers what are some of the applications of those thermometers. Federico: So those are used to measure temperature in places where you cannot use contact thermometery,
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for example, in a cell. There you need to inject a luminescent nanoparticles so that you can measure temperature or, for example, in turbine blade that is rotating and you cannot stick a thermal couple, so you need or other types off of thermometry approaches and that's where luminescence thermometry enters. Any other questions? Go ahead don't be shy. Melissa Rochon: Federico there's a question in the in the chat and they asked is the instrumentation
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easily accessible, or does their end up being a bottleneck for projects because it's a filled schedule for instrument use. Federico: that's an excellent question thanks for asking, so this is much more interesting you guys ask a bunch of questions and having me just speak there so. No, the question is, there is no bottleneck for you to get your project going, because the because it's hard to access the instrumentation. One of the things that we are very proud of is the Lumigen
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Instruments Center. Which is very professional your run. We make sure, first, that your trained or you will be trained on the instruments prior to getting you access. And once you are given access, you will operate doing is from an on your own so that you become proficient because that's one of the skills that you want to get out of your PhD, right, instrumentation skills. And one of the things I very much like out of the LIC is that, of course, if
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you're running into trouble there's going to be a staff member to help you but what what what I like is that staff members here, all of them are they have PhD degrees and that is very important. I've been in places where the staff members we're not we're not PhDs and it's never a good idea. So here we pay them well enough that they do a very good job, and there is no there is no instrument that I know off in which you have a lag in
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terms of getting getting your data so very good question. And one more thing is that we keep updating instruments right so every year we submit a proposal to a federal agency to keep going to get a new instrument to update any instrument because that's that's our that's our permanent effort right oh that's how we got the new TEM, for example. Other questions? Student: Hey, I have one question, so this is Firoz Ahmed, and I had a question about
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the role of halogen in the ligand. I really curious it with the halogen into the ligand and it's like what's the main prospect of Halogen in the ligand and what's new about the liht and because it's something like it's gonna anything some lights so it's interesting for me. So what a future prospect or teacher application what people haven't done before. Federico: So the idea is to create a new family of materials that has two different perspectives
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one is, we can use those a halogenated ligands or materials containing halogenated ligands to decompose any solution and make Hello generated crystals that could be used for luminescence, for example, and the other perspective used to have those halogenated ligand containing materials, is to have themselves luminesce that could be interesting for our idea of publications, including biosensor. Student: All right, all right yeah Thank you so much for clarifying this information, thank you yeah.
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Federico: Other questions? Anything goes so don't be shy. Student: I guess, I have another um with all this funding, what does the average research group size look like for the inorganic department, because it looks like you guys are well well funded compared to some of the other presentations i've seen so far? Federico: The average it's hard to define an average size but, for example, I think. Right now, my group is five. Stephanie I think she's five, Chuck is
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maybe a little bigger because he has Postdocs, maybe seven. Claudio is maybe around five too and Stas is either five or six so we don't have in the organic division armies, so we have groups. Meeting that you will have, and but that's not just the inorganic dicision it's the whole department right. So we don't build empires we build research groups and that's that's our way also off keeping the relationship between the advisor the students
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collegial which it's up to you right but that's something that I like. Student: All right, thank you for clearing that up I know i'm when I go into some of your research pages, I see like armies of people like 20 plus i'm like what is that good yes that's why. Federico: Maybe the maybe that picture is not up to date, because I don't recall any like having 20 people, maybe I think the largest group right now here in chemistry, maybe 13 or 14 or something like that.
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Melissa Rochon: I like that phrase that you use, though, that we build groups not armies that's it's true. Federico: One more question in the chat okay. Do you have a crystallographer in the department? We have someone who is in charge of the single crystal X- Ray machine and she can solve structures for you but it is the preference of the PI’s that use a single crystal machine that she trains you into structure solving and then you get you acquire the skill of solving crystal
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structures on your own because that's something that you will carry after. graduation and that's it's important to have. You're not going to make a career out of solving crystal structures but it's a good skill to have so. We have someone in charge, of the single crystal X-ray Fractometer, yes, and she can train you on data collection and analysis. Melissa Rochon: All right, well, thank you so much for joining us, oh another question?
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Federico: Maybe maybe someone's typing. Maybe we have three more minutes I don't know. Go ahead and ask. Melissa Rochon: All right, well, I will be circulating everyone that spoke today’s emails emails if you have additional questions you can reach out to Dr. Rabuffetti and ask him some more questions that way. But our our time that we allotted for this meeting is coming to it has come to an end so i'm going to switch gears and and say thank you for your time.
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