Four faculty members in the UVM Department of Chemistry have been awarded more than $3.2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Department Chair and Professor Matthias Brewer, Associate Dean and Professor Rory Waterman, Associate Professor Matthew Liptak, and Assistant Professor Michael Ruggerio were awarded grants that collectively represent one of the largest pools of funding received at one time in the Chemistry Department’s history. The total amount awarded is $3,277,341.

​​“The Office of Research is thrilled to see the remarkable growth in extramural support for Chemistry,” said Kirk Dombrowski, UVM Vice President of Research. “Over the last two years, this group has created a plan to expand the impact of the department, grow external partnerships and funding, and build a national-level graduate program. The field of chemistry continues to provide vital information and innovations for our world, from drug discovery to material science to the chemical basis of life and living. I’m especially excited to see the department’s efforts to bring undergraduate students into the laboratory. We know that meaningful research participation is a key driver of student achievement. Growing student opportunities like this are critical to UVM’s future.”

Department Chair and Professor Matthias Brewer, Ph.D.

Brewer received a three-year, $500,000 grant award from the NSF for his research project, Vinyl Diazonium Ions as Synthetic Intermediates. The basis for his research is how vinyl diazonium ions, which are uncommon chemical building blocks, can serve as critical synthetic tools.

“Part of our research is developing new synthetic methodology that allows us to make molecules in new ways,” Brewer says. “The vinyl diazoniums we’re looking at haven’t been used as synthetic intermediates very much in the past. What we’ve found is that they can undergo some useful bond-forming reactions.”

Investigating innovative strategies to prepare organic molecules is an essential goal of this project. It enables advances in many other research fields that depend on complex organic molecule synthesis, such as drug discovery and materials science. 

“Hopefully, it will allow synthetic chemists and medicinal chemists to prepare complicated molecules more easily,” he says.

The NSF grants include a broader impact component to demonstrate the potential to benefit society and contribute to achieving specific, desired societal outcomes.

One broader impact piece for Brewer’s research grant is establishing a retreat for under-represented UVM graduate students to help them make connections across different STEM fields and gain a strong sense of community.

“We’re hoping to put on the retreat next spring,” Brewer says. “We’ll start it on a pilot scale with 20 graduate students with the potential to grow and incorporate undergraduate students in the future.”

Associate Dean and Professor Rory Waterman, Ph.D.

Waterman received a three-year, $477,344 grant award from the NSF for his research project, Diverse and Selective Catalytic P–C Bond Formation. His research aims to deliver a new generation of faster, more efficient, and better-controlled catalysts that enable the synthesis of phosphorus compounds, thus helping researchers in various fields.

Waterman explains that when people hear the word phosphorus, they often think of acute runoff pollution from residential and farming fertilizers, which is phosphate. Phosphorus, however, has a much deeper story. It’s an element that appears in all living things and some medicines—including some COVID vaccines—and many consumer goods, and it is a finite resource.

“We’re thinking about how to optimally use this limited resource for all those other things outside of agriculture, so there is ample phosphorus as phosphate to be used responsibly to feed people,” he says.

For that to work, Waterman is developing catalysts that make chemical reactions faster, more efficient, or better at producing one specific product. The project funds efforts to discover new, more sustainable catalysts for reactions involving phosphorus. It also takes a deeper dive into those reactions and explores innovations in materials and medicines that use phosphorus.

A broader impact piece Waterman is focused on is Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), which aims to transform traditional coursework into a research environment that meets both educational and research objectives.

“I’ve been working with high school students in the lab for my entire time at UVM. Much of that has been enabled by NSF-funded research,” Waterman says. “Typically, I’ve been able to partner with other organizations, such as the American Chemical Society’s Project SEED program, to support bringing students from marginalized groups in science into the lab.”

In this project, Waterman envisions using CURE and partnering with 4-H and UVM Extension.

“In an ideal world, we can reach more students and get the same kinds of outcomes that we’ve seen for our Project SEED students, such as 100 percent matriculation in a four-year undergraduate program,” he says.

Associate Professor Matthew Liptak, Ph.D.

Liptak received a five-year $1.4 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the NIH to study heme oxygenase enzymes. His research group aims to unravel the mechanisms of heme oxygenases, which are enzymes with diverse biological factors ranging from iron recycling to iron acquisition.

“Humans use heme oxygenase to recycle the iron in our blood. Pathogenic bacteria have evolved similar, but different enzymes, to harvest iron from our blood,” he says.

Liptak’s group exploits two properties of heme to gain insight into heme oxygenase enzymes: color and magnetism. The color allows his group to complete spectroscopic experiments. His team carefully records colors of light absorbed by the enzymes, providing insight into the arrangement of electrons in the heme. Additional insight can be gained by performing these spectroscopic experiments in high magnetic fields, he says.

“Heme is red, which is the origin of blood’s color, and magnetic, owing to the iron at its center,” Liptak says. “We take advantage of both of these properties by performing spectroscopic experiments in high magnetic fields.”

Ultimately, this research may lead to the development of new antibiotics.

“Understanding these enzymes could lead to the development of new antibiotics that target Staphylococcus aureus, a causative agent of MRSA infections, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a causative agent of tuberculosis. What we are aiming to do is identify unique features of the bacterial heme oxygeanses that could be targeted by a drug,” he says.

Assistant Professor Michael Ruggerio, Ph.D.

Ruggerio received two NSF grants: a five-year, $599,997 CAREER Award for Mitigating Detrimental Vibrational Effects in Organic Semiconductors; and a three-year, $300,000 collaboration grant for Terahertz Spectroscopy of Clathrates with Professor Daniel Mittleman of Brown University.

In the NSF CAREER Award project, Ruggerio and his team of researchers are working to understand how the motions of molecules influence the efficiency of semiconductors. Recent work from the group, in collaboration with experts in the U.K. and France, has uncovered specific detrimental motions—called “killer-modes”—that severely hinder the ability of new semiconductors to do their jobs. The research project will dive into this area to help understand the theoretical origins of this phenomenon and design new materials to overcome these limitations.

A course based on Ruggerio’s research, an exhibit at the Fleming Museum, and a partnership with a local school district are all in the works.

“The goal is to use far-infrared light to see-through artwork, to reveal hidden details, such as first drafts or a signature that might have been painted over,” he says. “We are going to end up applying this method to artwork in the Fleming Museum collections, as well as design an exhibit to show how science and artwork are converging in the modern era.”

In the NSF collaborative research project, Ruggerio and Mittleman explore how gas molecules become trapped in solids, a process called enclathration. The materials the research team is specifically interested in are clathrates, and how a large majority of hydrocarbon gases, such as methane, are trapped in crystalline water in the Arctic.

“Understanding how and why this happens is crucial to finding solutions to climate change, as well as finding new materials that can preferentially trap detrimental gases, such as carbon dioxide,” Ruggerio says. 

Ruggerio and Mittleman will also create a week-long summer course for high school students focused on terahertz spectroscopy.

“We are going to give students a crash course in the theory, as well as showing them our instruments and providing hands-on opportunities to explore life in the lab,” Ruggerio says. “We hope that these workshops will help to excite and promote our discipline to the next generation.”