2023 Chemistry Newsletter

Graduate Students in a lab looking at lab book

Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
Department Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Department Lab Updates

Message from the Chair

Chemistry Department Chair, Chris Cahill

Dear Chemistry Department Alumni and Friends,

Welcome to fall 2023! As I write, the temperatures are finally letting up and campus is again alive with eager students and (ahem) long lines at Starbucks. As per usual, we are thrilled to be kicking off another academic year and welcome the “structure” of the semester. That’s not to say summers are second rate—quite the opposite! This year we had students, faculty and staff traveling (quite literally) the world over for presentations and collaboration at conferences, universities and workshops. Just take a look at the faculty remarks below. And we of course hosted our National Science Foundation supported Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), which brought undergraduate researchers from 10 institutions to our laboratories. Hopefully this serves to advertise our outstanding research possibilities and results in enhanced grad recruitment efforts.

Personnel changes are always newsletter worthy, and this year is no exception. We thank 14 graduating seniors, 3 PhDs and 6 MS students for their time with us, and wish them well in grad school, industry, federal employment, medical school, national labs and post-doctoral appointments. Well done, and don’t forget about us!

On the faculty side, Dr. Andrea Cook had a banner first year taking over our organic laboratory enterprise, and we bid farewell to Dr. Claire Besson as she has moved to Binghamton University. We welcomed Dr. Holden Thorp as professor of chemistry and medicine, a name that might be familiar as he is currently the editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals. We made such a strong impression on him when he gave the prestigious Caress seminar a few years back that he simply had to join our ranks!

My gratitude comment for this year is a bit more personal than in years past. That is, I remain grateful for the opportunity to serve as department chair. I am starting the second year of my second three-year term and, thus, you’ll only be getting one more of these welcomes from me. It has been an honor to serve thus far, and we continue to be guided by our Strategic Plan 2019-2024. Yet as the name implies, we’ll need a new one soon! We have made some truly significant progress on a number of fronts, and I look forward to helping formulate Strategic Plan 2025-2030 and to teeing up the next chair for success.

Chris Cahill
Department Chair

Department Spotlight

Farewell to GW: A Memoir by Professor Akos Vertes

After more than 30 years at GW, Professor of Chemistry Akos Vertes will retire at the end of the fall 2023 semester. He reflected on his accomplishments at GW.

As the cab was crossing the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, I looked at the city and thought, perhaps even whispered, “So here is where I have to make it.”

The monolith of the Kennedy Center was shimmering in magic light, and the Pentagon had not been attacked yet. The year was 1991, and I was about to start my first semester at GW. My startup funds were $80,000, and an empty 600-foot lab was waiting for me to fill it with compelling new ideas that would attract major funding.

My entire network of professional connections was left behind in Europe, so initially this proved to be a challenge. Based on the number of speaking invitations, the community loved my research, but when it came to funding somehow other proposals got the cigar. The year 1995 brought a breakthrough when a substantial National Science Foundation (NSF) grant was awarded to my lab. Almost a decade later, after a series of single investigator grants of increasing complexity, it was time to target next level opportunities.

In 2004, through a multi-departmental collaboration, we brought the first grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to GW. Another decade passed by, and in 2014 we managed to raise the stakes by another order of magnitude when a multi-institutional proposal from my lab garnered a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) award. Overall, during the past 32 years, more than $24 million external funding was awarded to my research. Not a bad return on an $80,000 investment!

Securing funding meant that I had the opportunity to work with a growing number of talented students, postdoctoral associates, research scientists and top-notch external collaborators. Throughout the years we tackled diverse research problems, from creating new tools for ultrasensitive biomedical analysis, to developing methods for the rapid discovery of the mechanism of action of emerging threat agents, to novel methods for molecular imaging of biological tissues, and to single cell metabolomics in biological nitrogen fixation.

Entering a new area was always invigorating because of the new learning opportunities and the exciting collaborations. Our results were disseminated in over 200 peer reviewed publications and protected by 19 issued patents. Some of the created intellectual property was licensed and commercialized by our industrial partners.

However, the most rewarding (and sometimes frustrating) part of all these efforts has always been working with people. Creating and imparting knowledge with students, problem solving with coworkers and contemplating the future of the department with colleagues have been challenging and fulfilling at the same time. As I am writing this farewell missive, I feel thankful to all of you, who participated in this 32-year adventure.

Looking back, I realize none of this would have been possible without the supporting environment, colleagues, and an institution that tolerated my initial ignorance and endured my impatience. Thank you all for three decades of fun and the opportunity to grow together.

As I drive home over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, I am reminded of the cab ride in the opposite direction more than 30 years ago. Indeed, I count myself lucky as the original desire to “make it” in this city has led to meaningful endeavors. Farewell my friends.

Vertes Lab: Photo Memories

Dr. Akos Vertes with a group of his lab researchers smiling at the camera

Dr. Vertes group at the height of DARPA.

Dr. Vertes Lab

Akos Vertes with a group of scientists in 1995

By 1995, a poor man’s time-of-flight mass spectrometer was built, the first NSF grant was landed and five students were working in the lab.

Rarefaction Shock Wave Calorimetry: Recent Results from the Sadtchenko Group

Since 2013, the Sadtchenko group, led by Associate Professor of Chemistry Vladislav Sadtchenko, has been on the cutting edge of the development of advanced thermal analysis techniques.

Virtually all physical, chemical, and biological processes are accompanied by the release or consumption of energy. Consequently, accurate measurements of heat flow in and out of molecular or atomic systems can be used to gain fundamental insights into their structures and the rates of physical and chemical transformations. An assortment of thermal analysis techniques have been developed and commercialized, including the “traditional” differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) technique, which measures variations in the apparent heat capacity of liquid or solid samples heated or cooled with rates of a few Kelvins per minute.

The Sadtchenko group uses ultrafast fast scanning calorimetry (uFSC) to investigate structural and phase transformations in glassy films of molecular materials. The FSC method takes advantage of exceptionally high heating rates, which are millions of times (!) higher than those implied in classical DSC studies. The primary advantage provided by such rapid heating is a proportionally dramatic increase in the sensitivity of the calorimetric measurement, which enables accurate measurements of the heat capacity of molecule films as thin as a few nanometers.

Furthermore, under these extreme conditions, the “melting” (softening) of glassy films occurs heterogeneously, i.e., it begins at the films’ surfaces and progresses into the bulk of the samples via a rapidly moving transformation boundary. This mode of phase transformation provides additional opportunities for revealing the structure and the molecular dynamics of glassy samples before and after their softening. Nevertheless, the exact mechanisms of the softening front formation and propagation in the glassy films have remained poorly understood.

The Sadtchenko Lab with the FSC apparatus used in glass softening studies.

To gain further insights into the complex heterogeneous glass softening phenomenon, the Sadtchenko group has conducted careful FSC studies of glass softening in films of amorphous toluene, a benchmark molecular glass, whose thickness ranges from 30 to 2000 nanometers. The analysis of the large array of calorimetric data conducted by a team of Dr. Sadtchenko and his current and former graduate students has led to a remarkable conclusion; all of the general trends and features of softening front propagation in rapidly heated glassy films can be described by Fisher-Kolmogorov–Petrovsky–Piskunov (FKPP) theory, which is often used to explain shock wave propagation in solid materials.

Yet, during FSC experiments, the rapid heating accompanied by a high flux of thermal energy into a film of amorphous material leads to the formation of an unusual type of shock front known as an endothermic rarefaction shock wave, which has been predicted by FKPP theory but has never been observed in solid materials.

The potential fundamental and applied significance of this discovery cannot be exaggerated. On the fundamental level, the shock-like heterogeneous softening of glasses is important because it represents the new behavior of condensed-phase molecular systems far away from equilibrium. Yet this highly non-equilibrium process may also serve as an efficient tool for rapid quantitative characterization of “ultraslow” molecular dynamics that define physical and chemical properties in a variety of amorphous materials.

Kaur, R.; Bhattacharya, D.; Cubeta, U. S.; Sadtchenko, V. Glass Softening in the Limit of High Heating Rates: Heterogeneous Devitrification Kinetics on Nano, Meso, and Micrometer Scale. The Journal of Chemical Physics 2023, 158 (16). DOI: 10.1063/5.0145218.

Department Kudos

Our faculty published over 24 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier journals such as Inorganic Chemistry, Science, J. Physical Chemistry Letter, Macromolecules, Nature, etc.
Professor Chris Cahill gave the prestigious Larsen Lecture at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. This was a university (and neighborhood!) wide event where he discussed “interesting science from the part of the periodic table no one ever talks about.” He is also co-principal investigator on the Consortium for Nuclear Forensics, which received $25 million in support from the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Noted Scientist Dr. Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journal and Honorary AAAS Fellow, joins our department as a full professor. His experience and network will bring great visibility to the department. Dr. Thorp rolled out the inaugural offering of the Dean’s Seminar Manufacturing Doubt in fall ’22 (prior to his hire as regular faculty). This was a grand success and students appreciated the experiences and perspectives from this experienced and high-profile scientist.
Our first-ever director of undergraduate studies (DUS), Professor LaKeisha McClary has settled into her role and is essential to navigating student concerns, advising and community building. She also pinch hit for Professor Joe Meisel by teaching his Frontiers of Chemical Research course, which encourages undergraduate research participation sooner in the curriculum, and helps to develop a broad set of skills for success in STEM. By all indications, this was a tremendous success in terms of recruiting undergraduates into research opportunities with our faculty and in enlightening students as to the research enterprise writ large.
GW launched its chapter of the National Academy of Inventors and our department was well represented. The department inductees include: Dr. Cynthia Dowd, Dr. Stuart Licht and Dr. Michael Wagner as well as graduate student Darean Bague, honorary member, and welcomed Dr. J. Houston Miller and Dr. Akos Vertes, NAI Fellows.
Professor Ling Hao had a stellar year. She received a $34,747 grant from the University of Pittsburgh to decipher a novel mechanism for iron-sensing at mitochondria and its role in erythropoiesis; a $100,000 Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement; a five-year $780,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award to develop mass spectrometry training tools and organize education and outreach activities; and was selected by the Human Proteome Organization as a 2022 Rising Star.
Dr. Akos Vertes was elected as an AAAS Fellow, the scientific community’s top honor for innovators across disciplines.
The Department of Chemistry will receive an endowed professorship, a transformative investment which will allow us to attract preeminent research faculty and advance our commitment to be the premier chemistry department for education, innovation and cross-disciplinary research in the nation’s capital.
The department worked with the undergraduate admissions team and introduced a Chemistry Department-tour led by our DUS Dr. McClary. The tour not only features our undergraduate degree programs, but also pitches about our unique combined BS Chemistry, MS Forensics and MS Environmental and Green Chemistry programs.
Congratulations to our 2023 prize and award recipients! Alexa Mehlman, a 2023 recipient had this to say, “I am honored to receive the Madeleine Reines Jacobs Fellowship for Summer 2023. This fellowship allows me to continue my research regarding the development of a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry selected ion monitoring method to separate and detect nitazene analogs in drug residues from syringe samples. Nitazenes are a novel class of synthetic opioids that are more potent than fentanyl and have started showing up in the D.C. area.” We are always grateful, not only for our talented students but also to our partners and benefactors who acknowledge our talented students and provide a path to enhance their growth as scientists. Please visit our Chemistry Department Prizes and Awards page for a complete list of our 2023 winners!
GW Chemistry has a new addition to the department: a history exhibit. It is a collaboration which showcases a collection of donated artifacts from Professor Emeritus Michael King, and was designed by Laboratory Manager Dr. Kris Noble and her team of student assistants. This exhibit, available for viewing at Science and Engineering Hall, aims to vividly convey the rich and extensive history of GW’s Chemistry Department to the university community and its visitors. Please stop by to see it whenever you visit the chemistry department office.
Professors Jakub Kostal and J. Houston Miller, co-directors of the MS Environmental and Green Chemistry (EGC) program, collaborated with ACS, EPA and other industry and government partners to create two very successful events. Shadowing day was a recruitment event where prospective students had lunch with current EGC students, heard from an EPA guest speaker, met with the program directors for a tour of the department and finished with a capstone seminar. ACS then sponsored the end of year capstone symposium where graduating EGC students presented “Green Chemistry and Environmental Justice at the Intersection of Government, Industry, and Academia” to partner organizations in industry and government.
Ashley Frankenfield, graduate student, Hao lab, was selected as a Bill & Marilynn Sweetser Named Scholar of the Metropolitan Washington Chapter of Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation. Her research focuses on the development of new analytical chemistry methods using mass spectrometry techniques to identify and quantify thousands of proteins simultaneously in biological systems, and the application of these methods to discover candidate disease biomarkers and molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases.
Dani Rodrigues, graduate student, Meisel Lab, received the Second Place, Presentation Award at the Colgate Smile with Science Symposium!
Vicky Wang, a chemistry student dedicated to making justice matter, combines her chemistry major and criminal justice minor to help underserved young people make college dreams come true. She was profiled in GW Today.
Since joining GW in June 2021, Laboratory Manager Dr. Kris Noble has been dedicated to enhancing safety awareness and culture within the chemistry department. Dr. Noble has already improved the incident reporting system, introduced After Incident Reports for lab safety best practices education, updated the department-wide safety signs and initiated several safety training programs. In collaboration with GW’s Environmental Health and Safety team, Dr. Noble has tailored the annual fall safety seminar to have a chemistry focus. What’s on the horizon? Dr. Noble is working on a semiannual safety newsletter.
Professor Martín Zysmilich is the deputy chair of the Chemistry Department, assisting the chair, Professor Cahill, with the daily academic and administrative affairs of the department. He is the director of graduate studies for the Chemistry Department, the chair of the CCAS Graduate Affairs Committee and a member of the GW Student Discrimination Report Committee. He has served as a facilitator in the 2022 and 2023 New Faculty Workshops organized by the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Alumni Class Notes

Ivy Akid, BS ’08, is a specialist physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital. George Washington University not only was an instrument to her path, but also where she met her spouse.
Dr. Cargill Alleyne, BS ’86, is a board-certified neurosurgeon at Piedmont Augusta and former chairman of neurosurgery at Medical College of Georgia.
Nathaniel Bachtel, BS ’17, is finishing up the PhD portion of his MD/PhD degree at Yale School of Medicine this year.
Deepanjan Bhattacharya, PhD ’15, works as a scientist with United States Pharmacopeia-India.
Keegan Caldwell, PhD ’14, was profiled in the article “Boston Lawyer reaches back to help incarcerated entrepreneurs.”
W. Jack Conlon, BS ’20, passed his Step 1 exam and is in his third year of medical school at Tulane University.
Anitra Denson, BA ’97, works at D.C. Health as the Perinatal Coordinator working to eliminate Perinatal transmission of HIV in D.C. and continues to see patients part-time.
Stephen Elkind, BS ’08, is product counsel at Google.
Lawrence Fertel, BS ’81, is the research director at Actylis Buffalo, a leading chemical R&D and contract manufacturing company.
Xavier Holmes, BS ’16, is with the Lebrilla Group at UC Davis building models for neurodegenerative diseases.

Adam Kutnick, MS ’13, is working for Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and develops blood tests using LC-MS technology.
Kira Lueders, MS ’66, is living in Maryland after retiring from a 43-year career in basic research at the National Cancer Institute, NIH.
Gregory Mcwhir, BS ’11, is an attending physician and core faculty at the Emergency Medicine Residency at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in North Carolina.
Samuel Norris, BS ’18, received his master's of public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is now a research assistant at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Robert Pike, BS ’82, is a professor and chair of the Chemistry Department at the College of William & Mary where he teaches general and inorganic chemistry.
Stanley Seelig, BS ’77, retired from the chemical industry and is recovering from open heart surgery.
Badri Shyam, PhD ’10, is currently senior scientist and director of sponsored research at Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation in Dayton, Ohio.

And they’re off! Updates on our most recent alumni:

Folasade Abdul, BS ’23, is the office manager for Khals CPR.
Zachary Basile, BS ’23, is in the MS EGC Program at GW.
Hailey Butman, PhD ’23, Dowd Lab, postdoc at University of Notre Dame.
Nicole Byrne, PhD ’23, Cahill Lab, postdoc at Argonne National Laboratory.
Spencer Bystrom, BS ’23, is a research associate at Eikon Therapeutics, San Francisco.
Annika Dombrowski, BS ’23, is in the MS Forensics Program at GW.
Jared Foeppel, MS EGC ’23, is in the U.S. Geological Survey.
Steven Guo, BS ’23, is in the ABSN, accelerated nursing program at VCU.
Natalia Blewonska Kedziora, MS EGC ’22, is a sustainable program analyst for Sustainable Building Partners.
Priscilla Long, BS ’23, is a research associate at AltPep, Seattle, Wash.
Chenyang Ma, PhD ’23, Besson Lab, R&D, EMD Electronics (a division of German Merck).
Annika Myshak, BS ’23, is in the MS Forensics Program at GW.
David Rothenberg, BS ’23, received a Naval Commission and is now attending the US Naval Academy.
Zachary Stickelman, BS ’23, is in the PhD program at Georgetown University.
Kirsten Turner, MS EGC ’23, is a forensic scientist 1 for Abbott Laboratories
Sophie Weinberg, MS EGC ’23, is a consultant II on energy sustainability and infrastructure solutions, Guidehouse.
Daisy Williams, BS ’23, Massiah Lab, MS/PhD Chemical Biology and Bioentrepreneurship Program at Imperial College of London.

Department Lab Updates

Cahill Lab

The Cahill research group celebrates 23 years at GW! Hard to believe! Professor Cahill remains committed to his chair duties, while the students and postdocs are up to great things. PhD candidate Chris Hossack spent the summer at Idaho National Lab, whereas Dominique Brager and Jordan Herder had fellowships to spend a few months at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Pacific Northwest National Lab (respectively). By the time you read this, Ben Walusiak will have defended his PhD and be a postdoc at Los Alamos National Lab. First-year student Liz Decoteau is off to a great start, as is postdoc Adharsh Raghavan. Undergrads are critical to our operations, and Ahan Panchal has been supported on a prestigious Luther Rice Fellowship over the past year. Well done, everyone!

Dowd Lab

This year has been another winner for the Dowd lab! We said goodbye and good luck to Dr. Hailey Butman, Spencer Bystrom and Tim Scranton. Hailey has started a postdoc at Notre Dame with Dr. Christian Melander. Spencer is a research associate in San Francisco at Eikon Therapeutics. Tim has moved to NYC and is applying to medical school. All are missed and we’ve enjoyed working together incredibly.

Members of the Dowd group participated in several meetings this year: Frontiers at the Chemistry-Biology Interface symposium (FCBIS), the Virginia Drug Discovery Consortium meeting, the Tuberculosis Drug Discovery Gordon Research Conference (in Barcelona!) and ASM’s meeting on CoA. Lots of opportunities for us to share our work with others in the field.

We are grateful for funding from NIH and DOD to support several of our projects. One paper is out this year, and we have two in the wings. Cindy has stepped back from university service to focus on research and teaching, but continues to chair graduate recruitment and admission for the department. We have welcomed two new undergraduate students starting this fall and look toward expanding our projects—making molecules against exciting and important human pathogens.

Hao Lab

This year is filled with many awards for the Hao Research Group. Dr. Hao received the NSF CAREER Award and Cottrell Scholar Award. Graduate student Ashley Frankenfield received the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) Travel Award. Undergraduate student Jamison Shih received the GW Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship. The group also attended the annual ASMS conference in Houston with six oral and poster presentations.

Massiah Lab

Although the Massiah Lab has been in a restarting phase this past year with many members graduating, you would never know it because the lab continues to make great progress.

In addition to publishing a nice paper in Biochemistry explaining why a protein has weakened enzymatic activity compared to other family members, they have changed the enzyme to have different levels of activities and are now attempting to explain how the enzyme with a similar overall structure can be modified to gain activity.

The group is collaborating with Dr. Anne Papa from the Biomedical Engineering Department in the GW School of Engineering & Applied Science on characterizing the interaction of the integrin protein alpha2b/beta3 with fibronectin and fibrinogen.

This past academic year, the lab mentored eight (8) undergraduate students, two of whom were from University of Minnesota (REU student) and the other from Colgate University. Diana P. Garnica Acevedo joined the lab in the summer of 2023 as a new graduate student having earned her MS in chemistry from American University. Dr. Massiah’s postdoc, Dr. Anupreet Kaur, left to join the Institute for Biosciences and Biotechnology Research, University of Maryland.

Congratulations to Daisy Williams (chemistry), Sophie Grudzinski (biology) and Nikhil Kalita (public health) on their graduation in May 2023. The Massiah lab will miss them.

Meisel Lab

Ben Kass and Dani Gomes Rodrigues passed their PhD candidacy exams. Chris Grubb, graduate student, received the Benjamin D. Van Evera Memorial Prize for Teaching Excellence. Undergraduates Nora Houseman (American Institute of Chemists Award), Priscilla Long (William E. Fitch Prize and the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Award) and Sarah Teague graduated—they will be missed!

The lab welcomed high school students Jackson Guo (School Without Walls) and Raka Adakroy (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) and REU student Jamie Pearce (U. North Georgia) as summer researchers. Undergraduates Cesar Pagan (Robert Vincent Fellowship for Summer Research), Natalie Clay (Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship) and Rose Milano (Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship) were awarded fellowships to continue research over the summer, and we welcome new undergraduate researchers Haley Bolton and Sydney Reiser to the lab for fall 2023.

Miller Lab

Jennifer Giaccai continues to bridge the work as a conservation scientist at the Smithsonian with her dissertation work exploring Raman Spectroscopy of carbon-based inks. She also co-edited and contributed to a recent book titled Scientific Studies of Pigments in Chinese Paintings.

Monica Flores spent much of the academic year continuing to “commission” our greenhouse gas sensor facility located at the Global Change Research Wetland at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). This facility was the subject of talks given at the American Geophysical Union, (AGU), the European Geoscience Union (EGU) and the Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO). Monica has transitioned to data collection with a system that measures vertical profiles in the atmosphere for oxygen, water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane. Both Jennifer and Monica are expected to finish their doctoral programs soon.

An additional graduate student, Erin McCaughey, has joined the lab. Erin has been thrown into a number of projects most with the common thread of studying combustion-generated pollutants. Stay tuned for next year’s newsletter when we announce a new research direction that combines elements of our lab-based combustion diagnostics development with some real world “use cases” in unwanted fire emissions.

Finally, we were grateful to host Frances Cohen, an REU student this past summer. Frances made important contributions in many of the lab’s projects.

Rodriguez Lab

The Rodriguez Lab published their research in Nature Communications! The author list includes a GW postdoc, GW undergraduates and two chemistry Nobel Laureates. Undergraduate researcher Leena Zitoun was selected for The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences Early Selection Program.

The Rodriguez Lab hosted the Smithsonian Youth Engagement through Science (YES!) interns. The interns are D.C.-area high school students from communities underrepresented in STEM fields. Interns receive resources to achieve their goal of attending college.

Voutchkova-Kostal Lab

Although Dr. Voutchkova-Kostal is continuing as the director of sustainable development for the ACS Green Chemistry Institute, the Voutchkova research group is dedicated to elucidating the impacts of transition metal dopants on the catalytic activity exhibited by palladium supported hydrotalcites. These strategic integrations facilitate enabling a diverse array of transformations such as decarbonylation, dehydrogenation, and C-C coupling.

Darren Dolan, graduate student, is working on catalyst design, characterization and implementation and has contributed to the lab’s patent for the multi-step transformation of renewable alcohols to longer chain alkanes in the jet fuel range. Darren has given oral presentations at national conferences and passed his candidacy exam. Rebekah Brucato recently defended her dissertation and is now employed at Kraton Corporation in Savannah, Ga.

Wagner Lab

Kevin McKenzie, Dustin Abele and Michael Womble are finishing their PhD studies, working to turn coal (lignite) to graphite, perfecting Si/graphite anodes to increase the energy capacity of Li-ion batteries and developing next generation Li-air batteries (with up to ~10x the capacity of Li-ion batteries), respectively.

Sumayya started working on her MS last year and will complete her thesis in the fall. Silas Cascio spent the summer working with us, supported by our REU program. Ritu Manickavelu and Michael Scarberry joined the lab as doctoral students.