Page 18 - CEMS Summer 2022 Newsletter

GIVING MATTERS
PPG invests continued from page 17
The Joint Safety Team, or JST as it’s commonly referred, was formed about a decade ago when research safety in academia became a growing concern and focus for universities across the United States.
In fact, the term “Minnesota Model” was coined after its work. The Joint Safety Team, led by graduate student and postdoctoral associate laboratory safety officers in CHEM and CEMS, published “Student Involvement in Improving the Culture of Safety in the Academic Laboratories” in 2013. The Journal of Chemical Education article described how the team played a key role in improving the culture and practice of safety in both departments, and made safety in research labs an integral part of life in the college.
PPG funds enable the group to continue organizing biannual peer-led evaluations of laboratory safety, hosting bimonthly events on a variety of safety topics, and posting safety-related content around the CHEM and CEMS buildings.
“With the help of grants like these we can maintain our leadership role in the realm of bottom-up lab safety,” Bader said.
Energy researchers continued from page 7 the catalytic and electronic properties of the catalyst
exceeded our expectations.”
The catalytic condenser design has broad utility as a platform device for a range of manufacturing applications. This versatility comes from its nanometer fabrication
that incorporates graphene as an enabling component
of the active surface layer. The power of the device to stabilize electrons (or the absence of electrons called “holes”) is tunable with varying composition of a strongly insulating internal layer. The device’s active layer
also can incorporate any base catalyst material with additional additives, that can then be tuned to achieve the properties of expensive catalytic materials.
“We view the catalytic condenser as a platform technology that can be implemented across a host of manufacturing applications,” said Dan Frisbie, research team member. “The core design insights and novel components can be modified to almost any chemistry we can imagine.”
The team plans to continue their research on catalytic condensers by applying it to precious metals for some
of the most important sustainability and environmental problems. With financial support from the U.S. Department
“It gives us legitimacy as an organization and validates our safety approach, he added. It also helps fund our new initiative—called Community Connections—to pass along what we have learned about academic safety to primarily undergraduate institutions and high schools.”
Also on the horizon for the Joint Safety Team, with PPG support, is the potential establishment of an accredited safety workshop for high school teachers.
“We hope our efforts will enable future chemists to start thinking about laboratory safety at a younger age, thus making them better future scientists,” said Brady Bresnahan, the team’s other co-president.
“Just as the JST was the first organization of its kind in
the country, and has since led the formation of around
20 more laboratory safety teams following its model,” Bresnahan added, “our new Community Connections safety committee is the first of its kind—and we hope it will lead to similar future growth at other universities.”
Press release written by Pauline Oo, College of Science and Engineering.
of Energy and National Science Foundation, several parallel projects are already in progress to store renewable electricity as ammonia, manufacture the key molecules in renewable plastics, and clean gaseous waste streams.
The experimental invention of the catalytic condenser is part of a larger mission of the U.S. Department of Energy, and this work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences Catalysis program via grant #DE-SC0021163. Additional support to fabricate and characterize the catalytic condenser devices was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation CBET- Catalysis program (Award #1937641) and the MRSEC program DMR-2011401. Funding was also provided
by donors Keith and Amy Steva. Electron microscopy work was carried out in the University of Minnesota’s Characterization Facility.
Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and University of California, Santa Barbara were also involved in the study.
Press release written by Rhonda Zurn, College of Science and Engineering.
18 www.cems.umn.edu