Jason Green, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is part of a research team that has been awarded sjx and a quarter million dollars to develop new theories and models to make predictions of complex chemical reactions, including methods of combustion.
The research team’s project consists of one experimentalist, six theorists and specialists in the fields of chemistry, physics and mathematics from the University of Missouri, the University of California system and Northwestern University.
“Everything around us can be understood from the perspective of chemistry,” Green said, “To design better fuels, drugs, or materials, we need to devise theories that can better predict the outcome of complex chemical reactions.”
“What is new here: we are going to bring ideas from different disciplines, extend and adapt them, so we can make new predictions of ‘complex chemistry’,” added Green.
“We are going to focus on the aspects of combustion that make accurate, general predictions difficult,” Green said. “We would like to know how much energy will be wasted during a chemical reaction without having to carry out the reaction in a laboratory. We would like to know what sequences of molecular transformations connect reactants to products,” he explained.
Taking everything into consideration, Green said there can be many influences that make predicting a chemical reaction difficult, particularly when the reaction happens in a harsh environment.
“It is especially hard to predict the outcomes of some reactions, so we want to develop a theory that eliminates the complexity, and still allows us to make useful predictions,” he said, in an article published on UMass Boston’s website.
Green said that each of the principle investigators will form their own research teams on their respective colleges or universities campuses.
Professor Green and his team will use approximately $1 million of the funding to support research efforts on this project at UMass Boston.
“The funds will support graduate students and post-doctoral researchers involved in the project,” he said.
Green is going to oversee a team at UMass Boston that will work on the research project entitled, “New Theoretical and Experimental Methods for Predicting Fundamental Mechanisms of Complex Chemical Processes.”
This $6.25 million research project is funded through the Army Research Office, Department of Defense, and Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative. “It is an ambitious and exciting project” Green said, “because we will develop novel theories and put them into practice.”