From Two Dimensional Polymers and Polymerizations – Prof. Dichtel

William (Will) Dichtel is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. He is a pioneer in designing and developing novel porous materials made from simple carbon-based building blocks that can store, detect, and separate small molecules and ions. His group’s research focuses on developing techniques to crystallize molecules into two- and three-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (COFs), which has long been a dream in polymer science. This opens the door to an entirely new class of materials that can be tailored for a wide range of applications using a combination of their structure and empty space. Dichtel co-founded the startup company Cyclopure, which commercializes materials that remove trace pollutants from water.

“We have Nature’s toolbox in front of us, and it’s just a matter of what should we make and how do we push the limits of these materials even more.”

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

Will Dichtel (e-mail: wdichtel@northwestern.edu) received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from MIT, where he performed research with Prof. Tim Swager. Dichtel obtained his Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley under Prof. Jean M. J. Fréchet. He was a joint postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Fraser Stoddart, UCLA, and Prof. James Heath, Caltech. He began his independent academic career at Cornell University in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. In 2016, he moved to Northwestern University as the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry.

His achievements have been recognized by a number of awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, the IUPAC Award for Creativity in Applied Polymer Science, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Beckman Young Investigator Award.

Visit https://sites.northwestern.edu/dichtel/ to find out more about Prof. Dichtel and his group’s research.

Abstract

Synthetic chemists have developed robust methods to synthesize discrete molecules, linear and branched polymers, and disordered cross-linked networks. However, two-dimensional (2D) polymers prepared from designed monomers have been long missing from these capabilities, both as objects of chemical synthesis and in nature. Recently, new polymerization strategies and characterization methods have enabled the unambiguous realization of 2D, covalently linked macromolecular sheets. In the early realization of this synthetic challenge, polymerization conditions were identified empirically by screening polymerization conditions through powder x-ray diffraction analysis of the insoluble powder products, which provided polycrystalline samples with crystalline domains with average in-plane dimensions of 25-50 nm. More recently, we have developed tools to study these polymerizations experimentally and computationally, which has given rise to the first controlled two-dimensional polymerizations, along with materials of improved quality. I will present these approaches and the properties of high-quality 2D polymers that are now starting to emerge.

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