This Chemistry site was last updated: February 22, 2002.
This page is divided into the following sections:
Between Sept. 1998 and Sept. 2001, I worked at a small high-tech, R&D company by the name of Chemat Technology. My inital work at Chemat involved the development of electronic materials (and coatings) for semiconductor applications and integrated circuits (I.C.'s). This work was heavily slanted towards Materials Science and Polymer Chemistry, and involved a wide range of techniques from FTIR to NMR to TGA to ellipsometry to nanoindentation and TEM. Specifically the work has involved the use polymer products as dielectric materials in I.C.'s. This project lasted almost two and a half years, generated two patent submissions, and is on the verge of becoming a product used in the semiconductor industry. After the conclusion of the dielectric project, I was promoted to Senior Research Scientist at Chemat, where I oversaw or consulted on most of Chemat's research projects including materials for fuel cells and batteries, and for anti-reflective coatings for glasses and lenses. I also was involved in proposal writing and project development, and in technical marketing, in this capacity.
To this day, I continue to be a consultant for Chemat on a variety of its projects.
More details on this research can be found in my resume.
Polyaniline (Emeraldine form)
A large part of my Graduate research at the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at UCLA (6/93 to 10/98) under Prof. Richard B. Kaner involved the development of the conducting polymer, Polyaniline, for use as a superior membrane for liquid separations (i.e. pervaporation; see J. Membr. Sci., 174, 161, 2000).
These experiments showed that fully HCl-doped polyaniline is an excellent membrane for the selective separation of water from acetic acid, unlike undoped(dedoped) polyaniline which displays only a slight selectivity for water (Macromolecules, 31, 5456, 1998; SPE '98, ANTEC Proceedings, 1301, 1998; Synthetic Metals, 84, 799, 1997). This illustrates the ease with which the simple process of doping or undoping polyaniline can have profound effects on its performance as a membrane. Pervaporation experiments looking at the selectivity of polyaniline towards the solvents pair of ethanol/water were also performed (Synthetic Metals, 102, 1311, 1999).
Further, pervaporation experiments using polyaniline and related materials to measure the intrinsic liquid permeabilities and diffusion coefficients of water and other solvents were performed. In addition, I investigated the influence of doping, derivitization, copolymerization and blending on the structure and membrane separation properties of polyaniline. An example of this is the use of blends of polyaniline and polyimide in pervaporation experiments (Synthetic Metals, 84, 801, 1997). These synthetic products were characterized by NMR, GPC, TGA, DSC, SEM, Powder XRD, FT-IR, UV-vis and 4-point conductivity.
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| A Polymer Light-Emitting Diode (PLED) | |
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Before I left Grad School, I collaborated with the research group of UCLA Materials Science Professor Yang Yang to examine the effect of using camphor sulfonic acid (CSA)-doped polyaniline or sulfonated (self-doping) polyaniline as the electrode material in polymer light emitting diodes (PLEDs), like the one shown above. The potential application is in display devices.
My first research projects involved work I did at Dow Chemical Western Center in Pittsburg, CA as a summer intern in 1991 & 1992. That work entailed the isolation and identification of plant samples, and primarily involved Organic Chemistry; these samples were characterized by GC-MS, GC, NMR, IR and UV-vis.
A Metallofullerene
During my undergraduate years at Harvard University, I worked for one and a half years (1991-93) in the research group of Chemistry Prof. Charles M. Lieber. This research involved the synthesis of C60 and other Fullerenes, especially Metallofullerenes (e.g. Lax@Cy, Ndx@Cy, etc.), by arc vaporization, and characterization by FAB-MS, NMR and XPS.
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