Professor Amanda Morris

Professor Amanda Morris
Chair, Department of Chemistry
Virgina Tech

From Catalysis to Drug Delivery: Photodynamic Responses in MOFs

Metal–organic frameworks offer a unique platform for controlling chemical reactivity through precise structural and electronic design, yet their behavior under photoexcitation remains incompletely understood. This talk explores how photoinduced metal–ligand bond dynamics in MOFs can be deliberately harnessed to enable function rather than failure. Using Fe-carboxylate frameworks such as MIL-101(Fe) as a model system, we demonstrate that ligand-to-metal charge- transfer excitation transiently weakens metal–carboxylate bonds, generating short-lived coordination vacancies that can participate in catalytic reactions. Time-resolved vibrational and electronic spectroscopies reveal that the lifetime of these photodissociated states can be tuned over orders of magnitude through linker functionalization, directly influencing photocatalytic behavior, including carbon dioxide reduction. Extending this concept beyond catalysis, we show that larger photoinduced structural changes can be leveraged for controlled framework exfoliation and cargo release, enabling light-triggered drug delivery and photodynamic therapeutic applications. Together, these results establish photodynamic bonding as a general design principle for MOFs, illustrating how excited- state coordination chemistry can be programmed to drive reactivity, transport, and on-demand material response across energy and biomedical contexts.

Amanda Morris

Amanda Morris is a Professor of Inorganic and Energy Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Tech. She received her BS from Penn State University, her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and completed postdoctoral training at Princeton University. Her research program focuses on understanding light–matter interactions in molecular and extended materials, with particular emphasis on how excited-state processes govern catalysis, charge transport, and structural dynamics in metal–organic frameworks. Morris’s work spans photocatalysis for energy conversion, photoinduced coordination chemistry, and light-triggered material responses, combining electrochemistry, spectroscopy, and time- resolved techniques. She is a recipient of numerous honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Dreyfus Teacher–Scholar Award. Morris serves as an Associate Editor of Chemical Physics Reviews and as an American Chemical Society Expert in Sustainable Energy. She is active in community leadership, serving as the Chair of the Inorganic Division of the American Chemical Society and the chair-elect of the InterAmerican Photochemical Society.

Host: Prof. Gwendolyn Bailey