CPOS Seminar: "UC Irvine Doctoral Studies: Development of Fluorescence Microscopy Methods for Investigations of Polymer-Catalyst Dynamics and Polymer Molecular Weight"

Speaker: Antonio Garcia IV, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Barbara -California NanoSystems Institute, Co-advisors: Megan T. Valentine and Matthew E. Helgeson

Chemical synthesis is the process of transforming simple starting materials into useful and more complex compounds or materials, including those that are seldom found in nature. Mechanisms in organic chemistry enable these synthetic routes, and thus mechanisms are often investigated using analytical techniques that convolute signals from individual molecules due to ensemble averaging. Although these ensemble-averaging analytical techniques have proven useful, information from individual molecules or subpopulations of molecules cannot be obtained from these analytical methods, where what is missed is important. The body of research presented in this CPOS talk pushes the boundaries for polymerization, an important subset of chemical synthesis, as investigated by fluorescence microscopy. These studies represent early examples of measuring catalytic selectivity at the single-molecule level, measuring single polymer-particle growth kinetics in solution, and obtaining physical-property information about polymers through fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy. Polymer architecture is becoming increasingly complex, thus the development of novel and useful methods to characterize polymers, as described herein, is key to enable the development of next-generation polymeric materials.