I am from Kettering, Ohio, USA. In 2011 I completed my undergraduate degree in Chemistry at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio. I continued at OSU for my Master degree in analytical chemistry. During the last two years of my undergraduate and for both years of my Master’s I researched silicate glasses in the lab of Prof. Philip Grandinetti, using solid-state NMR on the Si-29 nucleus at natural abundance. The silicon nuclei in silicate glasses suffer from incredibly long T1 relaxation times, making natural abundance (4.7%) studies quite difficult. Therefore, my primary goal was to circumvent this issue by cleverly doping the samples with a suitable paramagnetic oxide such that T1 was greatly reduced, without affecting the T2 considerably (which allows for the use of CPMG acquisition to enhance signal-to-noise). In the end, I was able to obtain 2D isotropic/anisotropic correlation spectra of CuO-doped glasses at natural abundance in 3-5 days, which is the same timescale for experiments on undoped, 100% enriched samples for the same signal-to-noise. I used this technique to study a series of alkali and alkaline-earth modified silicate glasses, resulting in clear trends between the metal modifier and the chemical shift anisotropy. I successfully defended my Master thesis on this topic in August 2013.
Home Country | The United States of America |
Project Topic | Broadband method development for the study of highly-paramagnetic materials |
Project Description | The goal of my research is to develop and implement new methods to study paramagnetic materials (cathodes, catalysts, etc) using solid-state NMR. Nuclear spins in solids containing a high density of paramagnetic nuclei suffer from incredibly short excited-state lifetimes, generating very broad NMR spectra. As such it can be a challenge to uniformly excite and invert/refocus these spins using conventional square pulses. The recent development of SHAPs (Short High-powered Adiabatic Pulses) allows for broadband inversion and refocusing, which permits the implementation of correlation experiments that were not possible using square pulses; however, broadband excitation has yet to be developed. As such we are limited to using very short, high-powered square pulses to excite our spins. One facet of my project will thus be to develop an adiabatic excitation pulse to use for samples containing very broad NMR lineshapes. The primary goal though is to develop and improve upon experiments for isotropic/anisotropic correlation and heteronuclear correlation experiments. |
Project Home | CNRS |
Supervisor | Guido Pintacuda |
Starting Date | November 2013 |
Publications | |
Meetings | pNMR Applied Training Course, September 2013, Lyon, France Title: Solid-state NMR of materials and proteins Role: participant pNMR Workshop, September 2013, Chamonix, France Title: Multidisciplinary Workshop #1, joint with Bruker pre-Alpine Conference Role: participant pNMR Training School, February 2014, Mariapfarr, Austria Title: Electronic and Nuclear Relaxation, and Electronic Structure Calculation Role: participant pNMR Applied Training Course, September 2014, Cambridge, UK Title: “pNMR of Inorganic Materials and Bioinorganic Systems” Role: participant pNMR Workshop, September 2014, Cambridge, UK Multidisciplinary Workshop #2 Title: “New Developments in Experimental and Theoretical Techniques for the Study of Paramagnetic Inorganic Materials”/span> Role: participant pNMR Mid-Term Review Meeting, September 2014, Cambridge, UK Role: participant Complementary Skills Course, given by the RSC, September 2014, Cambridge, UK Title: How to write, edit a scientific paper and get it published Role: participant pNMR Applied Training, June 2015, Berlin, Germany Title: Introduction to practical pNMR shift calculations Role: participant pNMR Complementary Skills Training, July 2015, Prague, CZ Title: Personal Skills, conference presentation and Communication Role: participant pNMR Workshop 3, July 2015, Prague, CZ Title: pNMR : from rags to riches, Challenges and potentials of NMR on paramagnetic molecules, Role: speaker pNMR Applied Training, May 2016, Florence, IT Title: Expression and purification of metalloproteins for structural studies and Paramagnetic restraints in hybrid methods for protein structural analysis, Role: participant |
Secondments | 21/07-21/09/2014 : UCAM; January-April 2015 : Bruker; June-August 2016 : Cambridge |