Jordan Herder, Graduate Student, Cahill Lab, GW Department of Chemistry

The Department of Chemistry Presents:  Jordan Herder, Graduate Student, Cahill Lab, GW Department of Chemistry

The chemical and physical properties of the uranium and transuranic materials have been understudied owing to their relatively recent emergence as elements of interest. The advent of nuclear weapons prompted a surge in the creation of these new elements with limited regard for their safe handling and eventual disposal. It is the writ of actinide chemists to better describe the nature of these elements to inform proper handling and waste stewardship, by studying the reactivity and spectroscopic properties of actinide-bearing materials. Our goal is to synthesize these materials with systematic alterations to structure to elucidate how these structural modifications influence photophysical properties. Specifically, we are interested in how modifications to non-covalent assembly modes can effect uranyl photoreactivity, a burgeoning field of study for solid-state uranium based materials. We showcase several families of materials featuring systematic structural alterations and describe how the assembly of these materials give rise to, and influence, photoreactivity in the form of gradual photoluminescence quenching. We also discuss efforts to extend this study to transuranic elements, neptunium and plutonium, to better understand the role of f-electrons in this process. This work is the culmination of five years of effort to develop and utilize a platform with which we can probe actinide-based materials for structure-property relationships with regard to photoreactivity.

BIO

Jordan A. Herder was raised in Georgetown, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania in 2017. He was an undergraduate researcher for Dr. Charles E. Kriley, assisting with synthesis and structural characterization of tungsten compounds. He then spent a year working in an industrial setting for W.R. Grace and Co., where he conducted PXRD and XRF on zeolite compounds for quality assurance purposes. In 2018, he rejoined academia and began attending The George Washington University under the guidance of Dr. Christopher L. Cahill. Starting in June he will participate in the National Nuclear Security Administration Graduate Fellowship Program (NGFP), through Pacific Northwest National Lab, in Washington, D.C.