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Contact: Leigh Flynn
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466
7/22/99
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NATCHITOCHES - Dr. Martin Rudd, an assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern State University, has spent the summer working as a U.S. Department of Energy Visiting Scientist at the Ames Laboratory on the campus of Iowa State University.
Rudd has been carrying out research in the group of Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Robert J. Angelici.
His work this year has focused on the synthesis of organometallic molybdenum complexes that contain a weak sulfur-sulfur bond. The chemists working on the project have shown that this sulfur-sulfur bond breaks when the metal complex is reacted with a gold surface. This enables the complex to be absorbed onto gold and provides a potentially important route to controlling the kinetics (speed) of chemical reactions by varying the potential applied to the gold.
Rudd and his co-workers, which include synthetic chemists, surface chemists and electrochemists at the graduate, post-doctoral and visiting scientist level, hope that this preliminary investigation will lead to more significant Department of Energy funding in the near future.
"I am very thankful for the tremendous opportunity that Dr. Angelici provides me with his invitation to Iowa State University," Rudd said. "It has been an exciting summer working on a project that is brand new with such a broad range of chemists.
"The work is very different from the research I have done in the past, or carry out at NSU, so it enables me to come back full of project ideas for my students."
This is the second consecutive year that Rudd has worked at Iowa State University in association with Angelici. Last year, he and 11 other scientists worked on a project involving designing and identifying new molecules for extraction of radioactive cesium and stontium from low-level and middle-level radioactive wastes.
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