Functional electronic materials have transformed modern society toward a highly digitized and interconnected global community. The ever-growing demand for electronic devices with superior functionality poses a great challenge to the state-of-the-art field-effect transistors owing to the limited charge density afforded by silicon. Materials scientists and chemists have been working closely...
Commercial agriculture and industrial manufacturing have contaminated freshwater sources with persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, and radioactive species. Effective mitigation of this pollution is paramount to safeguarding human health, animal and aquatic life, and the environment. Conventional adsorbents such as activated carbon, metal oxides, resins, and polymers attain moderate to...
Self-assembled monolayers for matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (SAMDI-MS) is a platform that combines self-assembled monolayers of alkanethiolates on gold and MALDI mass spectrometry analysis to report mass changes resulting from surface reactions. The synthetic flexibility of the monolayer and the use of mass spectrometry as a generalizable readout method...
Electrochemical cell devices are increasingly being sought for energy conversion and storage applications due to their high efficiencies and their potential for operating free of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Solid Acid Electrochemical Cells (SAECs), which most commonly employ CsH2PO4 (CDP) as the electrolyte component, are uniquely suited to meet the...
Human skin oils are significant scavengers of atmospheric oxidants in occupied indoor environments. Many techniques used to study gas-phase transformations of surface films indoors have been limited to off-line bulk analysis, although more surface-selective methodologies are emerging. Here, we present a multi-prong analytical approach to characterizing skin oil ozonolysis. Skin...
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous, crystalline materials synthesized by combining metal nodes and organic linkers through self-assembly. The diverse range of building blocks available allows for extensive tunability of MOFs, enabling the optimization of these materials for various applications, such as gas storage, separations, and catalysis. This study aimed to...
Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) is a class of material comprising organic linkers and inorganic, metal-ion-containing nodes, with diverse functionalities and wide-range of applications. Because of their porous nature and functional nodes and linkers, they are competent candidates for gas storage, separation, catalysis, and so on. Most MOFs, however, are intrinsically insulating,...
This thesis document is comprised of three research projects. The first investigates the active vibrational modes involved in twisted intramolecular charge transfer in a Julolidine-BODIPY dyad using two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy along with DFT calculations. We identified two types of vibrations, compression and torsional motion, as playing an important role in...
Renewable energy technology, more so than ever before, is critical to the survival of humanity. For decades, concentrated efforts into designing and developing such novel devices resulted in the innovation of solar-driven photovoltaics that were competitive with nonrenewable alternatives. This thesis explores the dynamic behavior of alternative material candidates that...
Many processes in nature and human-made settings rely on the unique properties of charged metal oxide:aqueous interfaces. Despite their ubiquity, these buried interfaces are challenging to study, since any analytical technique aiming to overcome the relatively small number density of interfacial versus bulk species must be highly sensitive and surface-selective....