PhD in Chemistry - Nanomaterial Synthesis in Houston United States | Rice University

The Department of Chemistry at Rice University places a strong emphasis on nanomaterials synthesis, characterization, assembly, and their applications. Historically this started in the 1980s with the discovery of C60, buckminsterfullerene, which led to the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Rice Professors Richard Smalley, Robert Curl and then visiting Professor Harold Kroto. This launched a carbon nanomaterials emphasis at Rice that rapidly expanded to nanomaterials of many types. This includes anisotropic noble metal nanoparticles, metal oxide nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, semiconductor nanocrystals, 2D materials such as graphene and metal chalcogenides, MXenes, mixed-metallic nanoparticles, graphene quantum dots, graphene nanoribbons, and boron-nitride nanomaterials. New growth mechanisms are developed for the bottom-up fabrication of these materials, such as the laser-induced synthesis of graphene, colloidal wet-chemistry approaches to highly-crystalline nanoparticles of well-defined size and shape, and the synthesis of nanomaterials at the jet-head of 3D printers en route to 3D monoliths.