Group News

Former undergraduate in the group, Juan Contreras, has received a number of accolades in his final year at Auburn. In addition to receiving the Outstanding Junior Award for Biomedical Sciences majors last year, he received the Dean’s Medal, the President’s Medal, and the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award in his senior year. He was also accepted into medical school at UAB for fall admission. We look forward to working in Contreras Hall in the future!

Niharika Dalpati’s final work from our lab was recently published in ACS Applied Energy Materials. This work was in collaboration with Jared Delcamp’s group at the University of Mississippi. His student, Ravinder Kaur, and Niharika contributed equally to the work and collaborated wonderfully prior to Niharika’s passing in April 2023. Publication of this work was a long road following that event and we are pleased to finally share her work in this publication. In short, this research details how nickel dithiocarbamate complexes can operate as effective redox shuttles in dye-sensitized solar cells. These molecules operate with a similar redox cycle as the popular I^–/I₃^– redox shuttle. Comparative studies between the two types of shuttles at matched concentrations showed that the nickel complexes outperformed I^–/I₃^–.

The group attended the inaugural ACS Local Section Research Symposium at Troy University. This event, led by Dr. Farnum as the Chair of the local section, brought together students and faculty from colleges and universities in the East Alabama and West Georgia regions to celebrate chemistry. We managed to get a group photo minus one member: Humaira Yeasmin.

Congrats to Musharraf for passing in oral candidacy exam!

Congrats to former graduate student, Dr. Motiur Mazumder, for accepting an Assistant Professor position at Utah Tech University!