SMMARTT

Smart Metal-Organic Materials Advanced Research and Technology Transfer

The center for Smart Metal-Organic Materials Advanced Research and Technology Transfer originated in 2011, with collaborations between the Chemistry, Engineering and Mathematic Departments at the University of South Florida as a growing need emerged to develop designable porous materials for real-world applications. The current embodiment has grown with more members and teamed up with the Department of Physics at USF. Presently, Professor Shengqian Ma directs the center as one of thirteen professors actively engaged with their postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students working on collaborative projects with a central theme to use porous materials, such as metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, and porous organic polymers, for each professor's research specialty. Self-assembly blueprints (G. McColm) set forth the design of porous materials (S. Ma) where they can be synthesized on an electronic chip for sensing (J. Wang), solid-state power conversion (G. Nolas), used with enzymes (R. Larsen and D. Merkler) for asymmetric catalysis (X. Shi); embedded in polymer composites (J. Harmon) for medical delivery systems (J. Cai) or to ensure water quality (Q. Zhang); interact with DNA or protein units to build metallo-supramolecules architectures (X. Li); or doped for photocatalysis reactions (J. Kuhn); and they can all be accurately modeled by molecular simulation (B. Space).