This award will support collaborative research in polymers between Dr. Kenneth Shea, University of California, Irvine and three French scientists: Drs. Alain Guyot and Andre Revillon, Laboratory for Organic Materials, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Vernaison, and Dr. Jean-Paul Chauvet, Ecole Normale Superieure, Lyons. The objective of the project is the development of new polymeric materials that can serve as heterogeneous catalysts for chemical reactions. The program will feature a component of synthetic chemistry to prepare the network polymers and fluorescence and ESR studies to establish such features as: the accessibility of the network polymers towards solvents, the penetrability towards reagents, the presence of heterogeneous domains, and the accessibility and mobility of polymer bound functional groups. The project will benefit from the expertise of the CNRS group in the preparation of functionalized polymers and from the experience of the groups of Shea and Chavet in fluorescence spectroscopy and diagnostics.
