Chemistry Majors Named Recipients of Erickson Discovery Grant

The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that four chemistry majors have been named recipients of the Erickson Discovery Grant. Sindy Liu, Olivia Tancredi, Zhijie Wang, and Tanner Wolf have all received grants to support their research on campus. 

 

The Rodney A. Erickson Discovery Grant Program, named in honor of Penn State's seventeenth president, supports undergraduate student engagement in original research, scholarship, and creative work under the direct supervision of a faculty member.

 

Sindy Liu is a rising junior. For her Erickson grant research, she will be working with the Keating group—led by Professor of Chemistry Chris Keating—to explore the behaviors of phase separated droplets and examine how pH and polypeptide concentration affects the ability of RNA to interact and accumulate in these droplets. The two systems to be explored will consist of Arginine/ATP and Lysine/ATP. By determining what factors contribute to better RNA partitioning into the droplets, similar systems can be used to understand cell compartmentalization and other physiological processes involving these amino acids (arginine and lysine) such as protein synthesis and gene expression. Liu will be using fluorescence markers to quantify the concentration of molecules inside the droplets and compare them based on pH and polypeptide concentration. 

Olivia Tancredi is a rising senior who plans to conduct her Erickson Grant research with the Asbury Lab, led by Professor of Chemistry John Asbury. Tancredi will study solution-processable perovskite solar cells by investigating the effects of nanoparticle surface chemistry on charge transfer and photocatalytic reactivity, building off the work of former Asbury group member Eric Kennehan. By probing the ligand shell and examining its properties, Tancredi and other members of the Asbury lab will be able to gain insight into how electron and energy transfer processes are mediated. This will allow them to figure out how exactly the properties of the ligand shell correlate to electron transfer as well as how the ligands bond to the nanoparticles and in which bond rearrangements they occur upon excitation, which is important for improving the stability and efficiencies of the perovskite solar cells.   

Zhijie Wang is a rising senior in the chemistry major. He will be conducting his Erickson Grant research with the Cremer group, led by J. Lloyd Huck Professor of Chemistry Paul Cremer. Wang’s research will focus on the effect of Hofmeister ions on optical properties of Rhodamine 6G. He will focus on Hofmeister ions interacting with Rhodamine 6G dye in aqueous solutions and how ions affect its optical properties such as light absorbance and emissions. The group is also interested in the mechanism of the ion-dye interaction, specifically, the absorbance quenching and binding mechanism.

Tanner Wolf is a rising senior who plans to conduct his Erickson Grant research with the Elacqua group, led by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Beth Elacqua. This summer, he plans to work with Elacqua group members to study the effects of bulky groups on the ROMP (ring-opening metathesis polymerization) of donor-acceptor copolymers. Building off of the work of Maria Gregor—a former member of the Elacqua group who demonstrated the formation of well-defined donor-acceptor alternating copolymers using ROMP—Wolf will be working to synthesize a sterically hindered derivative of the asymmetrical cyclophanediene and study the effects of this steric strain on the sequence definition of copolymers formed via ROMP. Finding a reliable and efficient method of producing well defined copolymers, specifically donor-acceptor copolymers, would be a huge breakthrough in the field of organic semiconductors with widespread applications for technology, such as LEDs and solar cells.

Please join the Department of Chemistry in congratulating this year’s recipients of the Erickson Discovery Grant.