This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will continue work on the development of a designed, rational chemical functionalization approach for breaking bonds within fullerene cages. Insertion of atoms or small molecules inside these open fullerenes will be followed by re-closure reactions to regenerate the integral fullerenes with their entrapped species. These methods are ultimately aimed at the large scale preparation of endohedral metallofullerenes, species that are already having a strong impact on the field of fullerene chemistry and physics.
With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Professor Yves Rubin of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Rubin's research efforts are focused on the development of organic synthetic approaches to functionalized fullerenes to take advantage of the numerous ideal physical properties of this molecular form of carbon. The synthesis of these fullerene derivatives will have an impact on the development and future application of fullerenes in technological fields like photovoltaic devices or magnetic resonance imaging, among others.
