Research Projects

I'm currently in the process of choosing a grad school to attend. This entails visiting schools across the country to learn about their programs. Usually there is a poster session and/or meetings with professors to discuss their current projects. Some of these I found quite dull, others I thought were really interesting, though I might not want to pursue them personally. Still others were projects that I could see myself pursuing. I'm going to share one of the more interesting/relevant ones here.

Dr. Lipshutz at Santa Barbara has an interesting project involving green chemistry. Essentially he is trying to get reactions that would ordinarily only work in organic solvents to run in water. He's doing this by creating polymers which form micelles. All of the reactants collect inside the micelle, so the effective concentrations and the rate of the reaction are all much higher than they would normally be in water. In addition, he has tailored the polymer so that metal catalyst centers can be bonded to it, further increasing its effectiveness. In addition, the products, catalysts, and the polymer are all easy to reuse. From talking to his grad students, the project seems to be working remarkably well.