A CH633 Seminar ft: Karlie Bach & Rudranil Dutta

Karlie Bach

Abstract: Rising levels of carbon dioxide, and the resulting environmental implications, create a great need for effective and affordable means of removing carbon dioxide from the air. A major challenge in designing materials for use in carbon capture technologies is ensuring that the materials are not only cost-effective, but that they are environmentally friendly. Titanium is one of the top ten most abundant metals on earth and is therefore widely available and inexpensive. By binding titanium with peroxide ligands, we can design a material that is highly reactive for carbon dioxide chemisorption. This talk will focus on these newly synthesized peroxotitanate materials and their applications in direct air capture of carbon dioxide.

Biography: Karlie Bach grew up in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon. After 10 years of working in various managerial roles, she decided to return to school to pursue a BS in Chemistry at Oregon State University. During this time, she studied metal-organic frameworks with Dr. Kyriakos Stylianou and looked at how their implementation in undergraduate chemistry courses could help promote student interest in undergraduate research and develop their scientific identities. Bach is now working towards her Ph.D. in Dr. May Nyman’s lab, where her research focuses on designing new inorganic materials for direct air carbon capture.

Rudranil Dutta

Abstract: Ashwagandha (Withania Somnifera) is a medicinal plant, widely used as supplement for improving mood, stress, and sleep. To better understand the chemical space that these compound classes cover and potentially associated bioactive properties, I systematically compared chemical profiles of root and leaf extracts. But making sense of a large mass spectrometry data set of known and unknown phytochemical components has been a big challenge. I will demonstrate the use of a few bioinformatics tools and data reduction techniques to achieve this goal.

Biography: Rudranil Dutta was born (06/17/1997) and brought up in Bogra, Bangladesh. He received his BS and MS in Applied chemistry and chemical engineering in 2019 and 2022 from the University of Dhaka. He is currently a second year PhD student in the analytical chemistry division at Oregon State University. He joined Dr. Claudia Maier’s lab in 2023 where his major focus is discovering and studying natural products and their impact on human health.