We are pleased to announce that Shain Mollick has been selected as a recipient of the Faraday Teaching Award for 2024 in recognition of his outstanding performance as a Teaching Assistant for Materials Chemistry (CH367C / 390K) in the Department of Chemistry.
A new series of lecture notes introducing the fundamentals of electrochemistry are now available online. These notes are complementary to course lectures in 302C Foundations of Chemistry II.
Mike Aubrey has been named an Affordable Education Champion by The University of Texas Libraries, in collaboration with the Senate of College Councils and the Natural Sciences Council.
A new series of lecture notes on the common structure types and their relationships in crystalling materials are now available online. These notes are complementary to course lectures in CH367C / 390K Materials Chemistry.
A new series of lecture notes on the symmetry of crystals are now available online. These notes are complementary to course lectures in CH367C / 390K Materials Chemistry.
I am pleased to announce that I will be teaching a new Special Topics course in Inorganic Chemistry (CH 368C) this summer term. The course will teach the fundamentals of inorganic chemistry through the primary literature in a tutorial-style format. Each week students will be assigned one or two foundational papers in the field of modern inorganic chemistry and submit a report including their own evaluation of the work along with some prompts provided by the instructor.
I’m excited to announce that I will be piloting a Freshmen Research Initiative (FRI) stream in Materials Synthesis this summer. The FRI is a unique program at UT Austin that allows freshmen to engage in research early in their academic careers. This FRI will be dedicated to the synthesis of new redox-active materials as potential low-cost alternatives to state-of-the-art battery materials. We are particular interested in developing rigorous methods for the systematic mapping of large high-dimensional reaction spaces though a combination of parallel synthesis, powder X-ray diffraction, and machine learning.
This month we got the last of our major instruments in place with the arrivals of the UV-vis-NIR and FT-IR. This brings our in-house instrument count to six. To keep this data organized, accessible, and secure we developing a data management plan.
After a long 6 months we’ve finally got our new bench top powder diffractometer installed! Our Rigaku Miniflex includes a Cu-K$\alpha$ source, 8-slot sample changer, and a HyPix-400 MF 2D detector. We’ve also been testing the air-free sample puck with a Be window. While none of our samples to date are extremely air or moisture sensitive, we have been able to obtain two hour scans without any noticeable signs of degradation.
First official day in lab started out with a progress update on the newly renovated student offices and some final touches to the lab space including the addition of the new mobile cabinetry for our instrument module.
With Texas reopening in the wake of the pandemic, I was happy to stop by Welch Hall for the first time in over year! Despite the shutdowns, restricted access to campus, and continuing supply chain issues, UT Chemistry really pulled to together to make this happen on schedule. Ann Harasimowitz, Steven Moore, and Andrijana Vukovich are especially deserving of credit for all the progress made over the last year.
I’m very excited to announce that I have accepted a position as an assistant professor in chemistry at UT Austin!