Douglas A. Reed, Ph.D.
Douglas A. Reed, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Columbia University
Host: Professor Nicholas Race
Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Materials with Emergent Properties
Hybrid materials composed of both organic and inorganic components allow for precise synthesis of extended materials. In this talk, I will show how the tools of inorganic and organic chemistry can be leveraged to create highly specific electronic, structural, or guest responsive characteristics, producing materials with unprecedented functions.
The first part of my talk will focus on porous metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) for gas separation applications. These designer adsorbents could greatly reduce energy costs of current industrial separations and facilitate many emerging technologies. New frameworks are described that contain electron-donating metal sites, currently a rare feature in MOFs, which enable many new separations involving π-acidic gases through novel gas binding mechanisms. Furthermore, selective gas binding to specifically positioned, electronically interacting metal centers is demonstrated to induce framework structural changes that result in even greater energy efficiencies for separations than seen in rigid materials, moving beyond the thermodynamic limitations of classical adsorbents.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the use of atomically defined metal-chalcogenide clusters in single-molecule electronics applications. By precisely positioning surface organic ligands or tuning the composition of the cluster core, single-cluster junctions can be fabricated that display exciting properties like nonlinear current-voltage characteristics and directional charge transport. Due to the atomic precision of our materials, these features are highly reproducible across thousands of devices, substantially improving upon traditional nanocrystal-based junctions. The ability to accurately control junction features by modifying the electronic and structural properties of these clusters paves the way for utilization of these inorganic-based junctions in nanoscale electronics.
Douglas A. Reed, Ph.D.
Douglas A. Reed, Ph.D., is an academic research scientist designing new materials for applications in environmental solutions or nanotechnology. As a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, he is studying superatomic clusters and two-dimensional materials. He earned his Artium Baccalaureus in chemistry and physics from Harvard University where he worked on multinuclear metal clusters, and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, studying metal-organic frameworks for gas separations.
