News and Announcements
Congratulations Alumnus Brian P. Coppola
It has been announced by Baylor University that Dr. Coppola, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has been named as the 2012 recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. The award is the only national award for teaching excellence presented by a college or university to an individual and carries with it the largest monetary reward of $250,000 as well as an additional $25,000 for the awardee’s home department. Brian earned his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of New Hampshire in 1978, having carried out undergraduate research with Professors Robert E. Lyle and Gary R. Weisman. Brian’s outstanding contributions to the teaching of chemistry have been recognized with a number of previous awards including the ACS James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry in 2006 and the U.S. Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education in 2009.
AGU Outstanding Student Paper
Alexis Attwood, Ph.D. 2012 (Advisor, Greenslade) received the Outstanding Student Paper Award for her presentation at the 2011 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting for her presentation, “The Effects of Mineral Dust on the Hygroscopic and Optical Properties of Inorganic Salt Aerosols."
Congratulations, Alexis!
Sustainable Science: Undergraduate Thesis Research on CO2-Reduction Catalysis
Solar reduction of carbon dioxide to regenerate fuels or other useful materials is an area of intense international research toward the goal of sustainability. Photochemical processes based on catalysis by rhenium and other transition metals are well develope
d, but mechanistic details of some catalytic cycles have remained poorly understood. Professor Gonghu Li and his UNH collaborators, undergraduate Jay Agarwal and Professor Richard Johnson, have provided a key to this puzzle through the recent publication of a research article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. The UNH team utilized density functional theory and many hundreds of hours of supercomputer time to model a catalytic cycle for formate production via CO2 reduction mediated by a rhenium(I) tricarbonyl complex.
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