Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. Mercedes Taylor, UMD
Friday, November 1, 2024
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301-405-1935
plorenza@umd.edu
Structural Effects on Crystallinity and Porosity in Organic Materials
Abstract: As water scarcity intensifies worldwide, there is an urgent need to develop new ways to remove ions from water. Further, certain metal ions that are needed for batteries are in very short supply, so it would be advantageous to capture these metal ions from wastewater sources. With these dual goals in mind, my research group develops porous organic materials to selectively capture ions from water, yielding purified water along with valuable ions. We synthesize metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, and amorphous polymers, which we design to maximize selectivity and adsorption capacity. A major goal of our work is to improve the aqueous stability of these crystalline, porous materials.
Bio: Mercedes Taylor got her B.A. in chemistry from Amherst College and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked in the lab of Prof. Jeffrey Long. Before joining the UMD faculty, she worked as a research chemist at the National Institutes of Health, doing small-molecule synthesis for drug discovery, and at Sandia National Labs, doing materials synthesis for water purification. At UMD, her research group uses synthetic chemistry to design new materials that can efficiently capture contaminants or valuable ions from water.
