Landes Group – Center for Adopting Flaws as Features

First-year chemistry students learn data analytics in new lab curriculum

A team of scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Rice University and Danville Area Community College has created an affordable laboratory curriculum for teaching advanced data analysis techniques and instrument building to first-year general chemistry students.

Students in the course at DACC get a first-hand look at the inside of a spectrometer by building a simple one from a kit and discover how they can use programming and data science techniques to extract hidden information from chemical measurements, the scientists say.

Nanoparticles make it easier to turn light into solvated electrons

There are many ways to initiate chemical reactions in liquids, but placing free electrons directly into water, ammonia and other liquid solutions is especially attractive for green chemistry because solvated electrons are inherently clean, leaving behind no side products after they react.

In a published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Center for Adapting Flaws into Features (CAFF) uncovered the long-sought mechanism of a well-known but poorly understood process that produces solvated electrons via interactions between light and metal.

Graduate Student Anastasiia Misiura Defends Thesis

Graduate student Anastasiia Misiura defends thesis

Congratulations to Dr. Anastasiia Misiura for successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis entitled, “2D and 3D Single-Molecule Microscopy to Enhance Protein Chromatography” in Summer 2022!

To advance our understanding of underlying phenomena in a chromatographic column, 2D and 3D single-molecule techniques were utilized. We uncover the differences in protein motion in mobile phases, depending on salt concentration, and correlated the results to an ensemble chromatogram. We also demonstrate the importance of the combined influence of surface properties on adsorption-desorption kinetics of proteins to the stationary phase. Overall, we have shown that single-molecule methods can uncover the details of protein dynamics and transport at the nanoscale and relate them to ensemble chromatography and apply them to protein purification at-scale.