Preston Snee
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Chemistry
Chromatography separates mixtures by flowing them past a material that holds on to some components longer than others. It is central to drug production, environmental testing, and diagnostics.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
liquid chromatography
separation science
nanoparticles
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Synthesize quantum dots with functional organic shells, and modify chromatography stationary phases with complementary DNA strands, to control the attractive (enthalpic) interactions during separation.
- Track the 3D motion of single functionalized quantum dots at chromatographic interfaces in situ, using 3D fluorescence microscopy with about 10-nanometer and 10-microsecond resolution.
- Probe quantum dot binding and dynamics at flat, complementary surfaces by controlling thermo-osmotic flows induced at the liquid–solid interface.
More about the research
Yet no one has watched, particle by particle, what happens at the surface where the separation takes place. That gap matters more as chemists try to separate hybrid nanomaterials, particles with a hard inorganic core and a soft organic shell. For these particles, the shell's chemical attraction to the surface and the effects of particle size and shape are tangled together.
Why it matters
Chromatography underpins pharmaceutical analysis and production, chemical purification, environmental monitoring, and medical diagnostics, including separating biological particles such as exosomes. A microscopic understanding of how nanoparticles interact with separation surfaces could help analytical chemists and industry design more efficient and selective separations, including new osmotic-flow methods in microfluidic devices.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher Palmer
University of Montana, MT·Chemistry
Design and synthesize liquid chromatography stationary phases that retain molecules through halogen bonding, using well-characterized halogen bond donors in monodentate (one-site) and bidentate (two-site) forms.
Jianshu Cao
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Chemistry
Model how coherent and entangled collective states emerge among coupled lead halide perovskite quantum dots, using quantum dynamics theory alongside experiments by partner groups.
Chenjie Zeng
University of Florida, FL·Chemistry
Control the surface structures of atomically precise II-VI semiconductor nanoclusters by tailoring the metal-ligand complexes used in cation exchange, the reaction that swaps metal ions inside an intact cluster framework.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
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