Ben Walusiak, Graduate Student, Cahill Lab, GW Department of Chemistry
Assembly and Structure-Property Relationships of Perovskite Derivatives and Lanthanide Hybrid Materials
Fri, 15 September, 2023
10:00am - 11:00am
Ben Wlusiak, Graduate Student, Cahill Lab, GW Department of Chemistry
The Department of Chemistry Presents: Ben Walusiak, Graduate Student, Cahill Lab, GW Department of Chemistry
The realm of hybrid materials encompasses an expansive range of chemical compositions and use cases. Combination of organic and inorganic species grants the resulting composite material properties that may not be achieved by the constituent components alone. Hybrid materials constitute a rich area of research owing to their use in a wide array of applications, including photovoltaic cells, scintillating materials, and light emitting diodes. Hybrid Perovskites and their derivatives may assemble by several means, including covalent bonding and/or non-covalent interactions. Lanthanide hybrid materials may assemble in a similar fashion, via a combination of coordination with organic ligands, and noncovalent interactions. A variety of non-covalent mechanisms are responsible for the assembly of these materials, which can also influence their overall physical properties. The close relationship between molecular level structure and material properties warrants scrutiny of the specific assembly mechanisms present in a given hybrid material. Both perovskites and hybrid lanthanide materials offer a platform to investigate structure-property relationships (features that arise directly from structure or molecular assembly) and use those insights to design and characterize new materials with desirable overall properties.
BIO
Ben is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the GWU Department of Chemistry in Dr. Cahill's research group. His academic career kicked off at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received his B.S. in Materials Science in 2010. After receiving his M.S. in Chemistry from Eastern Illinois University, Ben accepted a position in industry at IBM’s Microelectronics Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, NY (2015). Realizing he wanted a career as a research scientist, Ben applied to and was accepted into George Washington University’s Chemistry PhD program in 2018 where he joined the Cahill Research Group. At GWU, Ben’s research focuses on metal halide perovskite-like materials, such as tellurium iodides. He studies how structural factors such as non-covalent interactions may affect material properties, including bandgap and luminescence. In the summers of both 2021 and 2022, Ben was able to complete internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which were organized through the NSSC (Nuclear Science and Security Consortium). Working under Dr. Alice Smith, he became acquainted with Rietveld refinement of powder x-ray and neutron diffraction data of mission-relevant materials. After graduation, Ben intends to pursue a postdoctoral position in the Materials Science and Technology Division within Los Alamos National Laboratory.