Organic Seminar - Jessica Lamb

The Organic Seminar Series presents: Jessica Lamb

University of Minnesota

Host: Zak Page

Title: Harnessing the potential of main-chain dipoles in polymers: New frontiers for physical organic chemistry

Refreshments served at 3:15pm

The core of physical organic chemistry is the relation of an organic (macro)molecule’s chemical structure to its reactivity/properties. This simple concept is a powerful tool to understand fundamental mechanisms, solve problems, improve sustainability, and establish design principles across a wide variety of fields. The Lamb group takes a physical organic approach to problems at the interface of polymer science and catalysis to transform how materials are made and un-made. Much of our work has been on polyoxazolidinones (POxa), which are an emerging polyurethane subclass for high-performance thermoplastic/electronic applications that have high thermal stability due to the five-membered heterocycles incorporated into the polymer backbone. We address many synthetic limitations of POxa and systematically investigate their structure-property relationships, particularly the effect of the strong, oriented Oxa dipole on material properties.