Funding for innovative research endeavors is aiding West Virginia University chemists in search of tomorrow’s discoveries.
The Don and Linda Brodie Resource Fund for Innovation supports chemistry faculty and graduate students pursuing cutting-edge science with the potential for commercialization. Funded by an annual $100,000 gift from Don (BS Chemistry, ’69) and Linda Brodie this award has provided vital financial resources to advance inventive research in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences for nearly a decade.
“One never knows where life takes you, and as a college student I had no thoughts where the future would lead,” Don Brodie said. “I literally stepped in to the registration line to sign up for chemistry, and from there I was brought into a world of possibilities. We hope that others will travel as we have through this wonderful maze of chemistries and change the lives of many.”
For the 2019-2020 academic year, three research teams received the competitive awards for research in areas like renewable energy sources and pharmaceuticals.
Enhancing energy production
WVU chemists Fabien Goulay and Mark Tinsley are working to address the world’s increasing demand for energy through new technologies using existing fossil fuels or renewable sources.
With limited petroleum-based resources and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, it has become more important than ever to identify alternative energy sources with reduced or no carbon dioxide emissions.
One potential solution is natural gas. While it is an attractive option because it does not require drastic changes in the energy production infrastructure, it still requires improvements in its thermal conversion into usable energy, the researchers explain.
To facilitate the commercialization of this technology, Goulay and Tinsley seek to understand the fundamentals of combustion dynamic control processes. They will first design new devices at a laboratory scale and then adapt them for more complex systems.
“Our research directly addresses this need for renewable energy through experimental and computational investigations,” Goulay said. “The design of devices using active controls to transform fuel into usable energy with minimum emissions has the potential to revolutionize energy production.”
Laying the groundwork for new medicines
Reliable access to synthetic pharmaceutical drugs derived from natural materials has helped revolutionize medicine. This approach has moved society from a primitive reliance on herbal remedies and elixirs to efficiently accessing early wonder drugs like aspirin and penicillin and more recently to exquisitely selective and targeted medications.
These innovations in chemical synthesis continue to drive drug discovery. Graduate student Alexa Martin is traversing unexplored synthetic chemical space that is of interest to both academic and commercial demands.
“One of the biggest challenges in modern chemical synthesis is in identifying what chemotypes and structure space cannot be accessed efficiently, and, as a result, what areas of chemical space remain unexplored or underexplored with respect to drug discovery and their pharmaceutical potential,” she said.
With support from co-advisers Gregory Dudley and Brian Popp, Martin is developing methods for creating synthetic materials that can be the building blocks for new pharmaceuticals.
“The greater the diversity of drug-like compounds that we can prepare practically through chemical synthesis, the better we can be at chemically modulating biochemical processes to advance human health and stimulate broader economic development,” Martin said.
Reducing reliance on fossil fuels
Society is faced with a growing demand for new sources of fuels and chemicals due, in part, to global population growth, depleting fossil resources, concerns of energy security and environmental concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.
Renewable and sustainable energy resources, including wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal power, are being explored as opportunities to move away from a carbon-based energy economy. This shift, however, requires renewable sources of carbon-based chemical feedstocks.
One of those sources is biomass — a renewable source of carbon-based energy and chemicals found in organic matter, commonly vegetable oils and animal fats. Biomass is one of the most abundant renewable resources on earth, with approximately 170 billion metric tons naturally produced annually through photosynthesis.
Its wide accessibility and low cost make biomass an attractive starting material for small molecule building blocks. Unlike fossil fuels, biomass-derived carbon resources are typically oxygen-rich and highly functionalized small molecules. Efficient methods of removing oxygen are needed to convert these resources into useful starting materials. That’s what Associate Professor Jessica Hoover intends to achieve through her research with graduate student Michael Stanton.
“Increased competition for fossil fuels and societal awareness of the disadvantages of the long-term reliance on petroleum has intensified efforts to develop alternative sources of hydrocarbons for use both in liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks,” Hoover said. “The development of new routes to access chemical feedstocks is needed to shift our energy economy from petroleum to renewable carbon resources.”
In the long term, Hoover aspires to develop new methods for converting renewable carbon sources, such as biomass, to chemical feedstocks and fuels.
“The Brodie Fund is great because it can act as seed funding to get the project off the ground and help us become competitive for longer-term federal funding,” she said. “It is outstanding to have designated support for graduate students, which is allowing Stanton to focus solely on research. We are working together on our next proposal.”
Additional support from the Brodie Fund early in her career was instrumental in helping Hoover launch her research group at WVU.
“That first award was so crucial for helping to get my research program off the ground when I first came to WVU,” Hoover said. “It allowed me to support more students in research assistantships than I normally would have been able to as we got the lab started.”