Department of Chemistry

Doctoral Defense

Under the direction of:

I. Jonathan Amster & James H. Prestegard

Honey is a widely sought-after natural product produced around the globe. It’s produced by honeybees that take up nectar from flowers and digest it in a separate stomach full of enzymes necessary to break down nectar sugar. The partially digested nectar is passed from honeybee to honeybee until its placed inside a honeycomb and dried via flapping wings. The honey is then sealed off with beeswax. Extracting honey from beehives has had the same method for years and has been done the same way to ensure bee safety.

With the ever rising production of plastic globally, a renewed focus has been cast onto the end of life fate of these persisting products.¹ Within this sphere, chemical recycling to monomers is a high interest area that focuses on the application of depolymerization to return plastics into reusable monomers in order to produce a truly circular plastic recycling economy.² Within this field, the two main focuses are on either finding novel mechanisms for the depolymerization of current commodity plastics or to find suitable

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are synthetic chemicals commonly used in food contact paper and paperboard due to their unique ability to provide both moisture and oil/grease resistance.

Immune system protects our body from attacks by pathogens. Immune system can also accurately identify self and mutated peptides on cancer cells and amount an antitumor immune response.¹ As a novel cancer treatment modality, cancer immunotherapy aims at training immune cells for antigen recognition or boosting antitumor immune response. Unlike conventional therapies, immunotherapy promises to eliminate both primary and distant tumors while establishing a long-term immune memory that prevents tumor recurrence. ²

There has been growing interest to drive chemical reactions via the direct use of renewable electricity to address sustainability challenges. The success of the approach rests on the use of the right materials to efficiently catalyze electrochemical reactions. Thus, there have been intense efforts to engineer catalyst materials whose surface contains the desired active sites. Despite the success, there is still much room for improvement in the field of electrocatalysis.

UGA Department of Chemistry Ph.D. Candidate Lily Birx recently received a 2022 Campus Sustainability Grant from the Office of Sustainability for her project "Full Circle: Minimization & Diversion of Waste in UGA Research Laboratories." As a researcher in Dr. Ron Orlando’s lab in the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC), Lily has diverted and reduced the lab’s waste by 85% while working with UGA Green Labs.

Department of Chemistry professor Dr. Vladimir Popik is one of three UGA faculty recently selected as a 2022 Senior Member by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists and administrators with success in patents, licensing and commercialization and have produced technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society.