Collaborative Research: Workshop: Challenges and Prospects for the Next 10 Years of Nanochemistry

With the support of the Macromolecular, Supramolecular and Nanochemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Professors Stephan Link of William Marsh Rice University, Jill Millstone of the University of Pittsburgh, and Katherine Willets of Temple University will organize a workshop on nanochemistry. The goal of the workshop is to bring together a scientifically and demographically diverse group of researchers across multiple sub-disciplines of chemistry, materials science, and engineering to identify and define the principal challenges and opportunities in nanochemistry research today.

The discussion themes aim to promote efficient, sustainable, and translatable advancements in the synthesis and characterization of nanostructures and to advance fundamental chemistry knowledge of these systems, particularly toward their application in nanoelectronics, semiconducting materials, clean energy research and technology, sensing, catalysis, and quantum information science. The workshop outcomes will be broadly disseminated in an Open Access journal article.

The workshop is planned for the summer of 2023. The workshop will bring together about 35 participants, including both theoreticians and experimental researchers, to identify underexplored, yet promising, research directions in nanochemistry and roadblocks to those advancements. Participants, with expertise ranging from synthesis and assembly to spectroscopy and nanoscale imaging, will discuss innovative approaches and challenges to the synthesis of nanostructures and to making high impact single entity measurements and their connections to ensemble properties.

They will also consider the knowledge gaps in and new perspectives on nanostructure surface chemistry.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.