SABIC recently instituted this award to spur and acknowledge innovation in scientific and engineering fields contributing to the advancement of chemical engineering. Purdum is the first author on the paper "Understanding Polymorph Transformations in Core-Chlorinated Naphthalene Diimides and their Impact on Thin-Film Transistor Performance," published recently in Advanced Functional Materials [1].
Ranked among the world’s largest petrochemicals manufacturers, SABIC is a public company based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with operations in over 50 countries with a global workforce of over 40,000. The award comes with a $3000 prize and a plaque to be posted at Engineering Quadrangle at Princeton University.
Geoffrey is currently a graduate student in the group of Yueh-Lin (Lynn) Loo in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. The group focuses its research efforts on areas of materials chemistry and physics of complex, soft materials, with emphasis on electrically-active polymeric and molecular materials. At CHESS they work to elucidating processing-structure-function relationships in organic semiconductor thin films for transistor and photovoltaic applications using grazing incidence X-ray diffraction at both the G1 and G2 experimental stations. The group’s home site describes how charge transport is sensitive to subtle changes in the packing motifs of molecular semiconductors and that research addressing how intermolecular packing influences electrical properties has largely been carried out on single-crystals, as opposed to the more technologically relevant thin-film transistors (TFTs). Time-resolved measurements of these transitions via UV–visible spectroscopy and grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction indicate that the polymorphic transformations follow second-order Avrami kinetics, suggestive of 2D growth after initial nucleation.
Geoffrey was also selected as this year's Kristine M. Layn Award recipient at Princeton. The award recognizes outstanding performance in research by a graduate student by the end of his/her third year in residence. His graduate work is being partially supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship from the American Society for Engineering Education in Washington, DC.
Congratulations all around, Geoffrey!
Reference:
[1] Purdum, G. E., Yao, N., Woll, A., Gessner, T., Weitz, R. T. and Loo, Y.-L. (2015), Understanding Polymorph Transformations in Core-Chlorinated Naphthalene Diimides and their Impact on Thin-Film Transistor Performance. Adv. Funct. Mater., doi:10.1002/adfm.201502412