REU Supplement to Tailoring the Ionic Liquid Environment in Nanopores for Green Reaction Engineering

The requested funds will support two undergraduate students for REU positions in the summer of 2017. Both student will be assigned independent research projects that tie into themes directly related to an ongoing NSF project (CBET award number number 1604491). One student will be a Chemistry student supervised by Prof. Folami Ladipo and co-supervised by the PI (Rankin). Her or his goal will be to synthesize and characterize a subset of the homogeneous aluminum-based catalysts for dehydration of glucose to 5-(hydroxymethyl)furfural and the ionic liquid-functional silanes for surface modifications. The second student with be a Chemical Engineering student supervised by Prof. Barbara Knutson and co-supervised by the PI (Rankin). Her or his goal will be to investigate the behavior of molecular assemblies at surfaces and confined within pores using a combination of structural characterization techniques (such as electron microscopy and x-ray scattering) and functional characterization (for example, with the quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring).