Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

1.      Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are studying the electronic properties that arise when inorganic nanocrystals are used as building blocks to construct mesostructured materials. This includes fabricating inorganic nanocomposite materials and mesoporous architectures. I am particularly interested in electrochemical materials including those for electrochromic devices and batteries, in which many individual properties such as electron and ion transport, optical absorption, and phase behaviour combine to determine the overall functional characteristics.

2.      What motivated you to focus on inorganic nanoscience?
Nanoscience offers a whole new frontier in manipulating properties through the arrangement of matter. Understanding how the size, shape, and arrangement of nanoscale building blocks combine with atomic scale structure and composition to determine material properties is exciting and often unexpected.

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1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are developing new methods for synthesizing complex metal oxide and chalcogenide nanocrystals.  Once we’ve developed a route and collected materials, we are currently putting a lot of effort into controlling the surface chemistry of the resulting nanocrystals.  Since small nanocrystals are predominantly surface, this is extremely important and necessary if one wants to extract any utility from these materials into a functional device.  Along those lines, we are focusing on devices for energy conversion and storage.  We are using our metal chalcogenide nanocrystals for low-cost solar cells and our metal oxide nanocrystals for dielectric capacitors.  As a synthetic chemist, I get great satisfaction when a material my group has made and labored over ends up in a device that actually works well!

2. What motivated you to focus on the synthesis and properties of nanocrystals?
Organic chemists possess an incredibly powerful toolbox of reaction chemistry that allows them to rationally design molecules with desired functionality.  Unfortunately, the toolbox for rationally designing functional inorganic nanocrystals is severely lacking.  Moreover, many synthetic preps for inorganic nanocrystals are plagued by impurities, work-up issues, low yields, and irreproducibility.  The concept of “materials by design” will never get off the ground with the existing limited design space.  We got into this area thinking we could add some synthetic perspective to the problem.

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1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are trying to integrate multiple functions in a single organic-based electronic device. In other words, we are attempting to fabricate devices like field-effect transistors that can respond simultaneously to multiple yet independent stimuli. This can be achieved by developing multi-component nanostructured materials.

2. What motivated you to focus on nanoscale architectures?
During my undergraduate studies the world of the single molecules was left mostly to theoretical predictions or even to imagination. During my thesis work, about 18 years ago, I started “playing” with the Scanning Probe Microscopies. These very powerful Microscopies allowed me to really “see” the molecules, to enter their world, and to look also at their “sociology “, i.e. at the way they interact among each other on the nanoscale generating highly ordered structures at the supramolecular level.

Naturally, after several years devoted to understand and control the generation of these ordered nanostructures I became interested into learning more and more also about their properties and how one can tailor them to develop nanoscale supramolecular functional materials.

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