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Assistant professor in chemistry lands CAREER Award |
| By
Kim Harvey |
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Apr 15, 2008 |
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Dr. Jared Anderson, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been granted a prestigious award through the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program.
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| Dr. Jared Anderson shows off an ionic liquid-based microextraction device in his lab in Wolfe Hall. The gas chromatograph in the background is coupled with a cryogen-assisted cooled injection system and thermal desorption unit that allows for the separation and detection of molecules ranging from the low part-per-billion to the mid part-per-trillion concentration level. |
The award will support Anderson’s research project, “Task-Specific Microextractions Using Ionic Liquids,” with $595,000 over a five-year period.
“It’s a big honor, because the CAREER Award is highly competitive,” Anderson, who has been a member of UT’s faculty for three years, said. “In my particular program, the success rate is 15 to 18 percent.”
The award will fund not only Anderson’s research project, but will help him develop his laboratory, create course work for undergraduate and graduate-level classes, and establish outreach programs to build interest in science and chemistry, such as an interactive, Web-based series.
“Recipients of the award are selected based on future leadership in the field, so it’s gratifying,” Anderson added. “The Chemistry Department here at UT is growing immensely.”
Anderson said research utilizing ionic liquids, which have the fundamental properties of common salts, have many applications and are ideal to use because of their chemical stability. Depending on how the salts are prepared, they can be designed to possess specific physical and chemical properties that make them useful for extracting targeted components from complex samples.
“We can vary the physical properties, such as viscosity and density, very easily without affecting the purity,” he said. “In the microextraction techniques we are developing, we can re-use the ionic liquid for over 100 extractions.”
Applications include pinpointing impurities in pharmaceutical products, isolating environmental contaminants, and profiling ethanol and ester content in wine.
“The application of ionic liquids in analytical chemistry is very interesting,” Anderson noted. “For example, if there is a gas spill on a highway, we can use ionic liquid-based analytical methods to determine the level of contamination in the soil and water around the spill.”
Ionic liquid microextraction also can be applied to quality control and assurance practices in the pharmaceutical industry. “We are working closely with pharmaceutical companies to understand their needs for high throughput sampling of pharmaceutical formulations. By slightly altering the structure of the ionic liquid, we can design extraction methods that can detect trace impurities down to the low part per billion level,” Anderson said.
“I see many possibilities for the future of research with ionic liquids,” he added. “Here at UT, we’re also giving them a lot of attention because of their green properties.”
In August 2007, Anderson presented his group’s research results during the second annual Conference on Ionic Liquids in Yokohama, Japan. He recently authored a book chapter about ionic liquids and will organize an upcoming session regarding ionic liquid research at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in Philadelphia.
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