Self Biography - As a high school student I had a physics instructor with an oil-leaking bionic leg who frequently handled billiard-sized plutonium spheres with his bare hands, smoked a mahogany pipe, and often mumbled incoherently in German. That's basically why I later chose to study chemical engineering and not physics. Though in truth, my scholastic interests lie in the application of science which engineering offers. I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2006. I now work with Dr. Plamen Atanassov and Dr. Timothy Ward as I study and research my way towards a Ph.D in Chemical Engineering.
Research Interests - My previous work at the University of Colorado involved the study of environmental effects on the polymerization kinetics and mechanisms of (poly)methyl-methacrylate based monomers – the stability of polymers under various, often transient conditions with bonds which are constantly breaking and reforming.
As an undergraduate employee of the Space Environment Center located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I studied the solar corona of the sun through the eyes of stationary satellite cameras receptive to different wavelengths, mostly in the extreme ultraviolet regime. Solar fluctuations are responsible for some of the most expensive and widespread damage caused by weather phenomena on earth. So there is incredible economic incentive to better predict space weather. These days, its just me and my trusty telescope.
The implicit goal of my current research as a graduate student is to replace the use of carbon in PEM fuel cells with something better. While high surface area carbon has been the material of choice for catalytic supports in fuel cells for decades, it plays no beneficial role in the catalysis and suffers from prohibitive corrosion problems over time. Utilizing spray pyrolysis as a materials synthesis technique for attaining high surface area materials of different nano and meso porosities, I make metal oxides and alloys which are potential catalytic supports. Therefore, the scope of my current research begins with methods of material synthesis and concludes with electrochemical characterization (testing these materials in active fuel cells). It necessarily encompases characterization techniques including transmission and scanning electron microscopy (TEM/SEM), x-ray diffraction (XRD), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Adsorption/Desorption Isotherms, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), rotating disk electrode (RDE) and cyclic voltammetry (CV), just to name a few acronym-laden methods.