Group News

The closing ceremony for the 2024 CASE REU program was held on July 18. Belinda presented her research results over the last 10 weeks. It was wonderful having her in the lab this summer. Smriti Somai did an excellent job serving as her mentor. We wish Belinda the best of luck in her upcoming semester at Hampton University.

Humaira Yeasmin successfully defended her thesis to obtain her Ph.D. This is the fifth PhD from the Farnum group. We couldn’t be more proud of her research accomplishments in the area of p-type CuGaO₂.

Our recent work in collaboration with the Goldsmith group has been published in Inorganic Chemistry: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.inorgchem.4c01977

This work was led by Goldsmith group student Segun Obisesan who now works for Evonik. We show that non-heme catalysts for ORR can yield high rates at low overpotentials with the aid of tethered quinol groups. This is the second publication from this project with many more to come.

We had a great time at our summer party! We celebrated the soon-to-be PhD’s Humaira and Rezonaul in addition to saying farewell to our summer REU student, Belinda. This was our largest group to date on account of everyone’s growing families!

A new REU student has joined our group for summer 2024. Belinda Allotey is a rising sophomore at Hampton University and will be with us for 10 weeks this summer working to understand the role of Zn²⁺ ions in the catalysis of two-electron Ni(IV/II) reduction reactions.