Mark Lipke
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Chemistry
Moving protons (H+) and electrons from one molecule to another is at the heart of acid-base chemistry, catalysis, sensors and electrochemical synthesis. In ordinary solutions these transfers depend heavily on surrounding solvent molecules.
- Fields
Chemistry
- Topics
nanoconfinement
molecular containers
porphyrin nanocages
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Measure how water trapped inside redox-active porphyrin nanocages changes the acidity of acid-bearing guest molecules and their combined proton-electron transfer, using electrochemistry and 1H NMR to quantify water uptake.
- Test how nanocage size, hydrogen-bonding ability, hydrophobicity and counterions alter proton and electron transfer when the cage pore is hydrated.
- Explain the experimental trends at the atomic level using molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations in collaboration with a computational chemist.
More about the research
For example, an acid hands its proton to water, forming hydronium ions. Squeezing these reactions into a space only a few molecules wide, known as nanoconfinement, changes how fast and how favorably they happen. Past studies have not untangled the many factors at play, especially how much water sits inside the confined space.
Why it matters
Learning how confinement and trapped water tune proton and electron transfer could help chemists design better catalysts, sensors and other functional materials. It could also inform how molecular containers are used to deliberately control reactions such as electrochemical synthesis, which is relevant to energy science.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Vaidhyanathan Ramamurthy
University of Miami, FL·Chemistry
Use water-soluble synthetic host molecules with cavities a few angstroms wide as reaction containers that hold water-insoluble organic molecules during light-driven reactions in water.
Shiyu Zhang
Ohio State University, OH·Chemistry
Synthesize tricopper(II,II,I) peroxo complexes in cage-like ligands to model the short-lived peroxy intermediate of multicopper oxidases, and characterize their electronic features by spectroscopy.
Christopher Hartley
Miami University-Oxford, OH·Chemistry
Determine how chains that combine attractive and repulsive interactions within a single molecule fold, programming structure by inserting pyrazine-2,3-diyl units, nitrogen-containing aromatic rings, into ortho-phenylene sequences.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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