Neal Kinney

Author: Neal Kinney | Major: Biochemistry | Semester: Spring 2023

Coming into college, I knew that I wanted to be a part of a research lab.  I had been extremely interested in chemistry since I was in middle school, so I knew that it was a topic that I wanted to learn more about.  The website for my mentor, Dr. Kilyanek, really interested me.  I reached out to him, and from there I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations we had about the lab.

For the Fall 2022 semester, I spent a good amount of time learning the techniques of electrochemistry and cyclic voltammograms from Dr. Kilyanek, as well as the details of the project that I am working on.  The overarching goal of the project is to conduct the oxidative cleavage of the β-O-4 linkage in lignin, a compound found in the cell walls of plants, using phosphomolybdic acid as the catalyst.  This is an important topic because this could be an environmentally friendly way to produce materials such as polyester and nylon.  To begin the research, the nature of phosphomolybdic acid as a catalyst needed to be studied.

The first step was to try and reproduce a baseline cyclic voltammogram for the phosphomolybdic acid in acetonitrile, using a carbon working electrode, silver reference electrode, and platinum counter electrode.  The results gathered from this experiment corroborated literature reports that multiple electronic states are accessible electrochemically for phosphomolybdic acid.  This is important because multiple electron states would make it easier to reduce the intermediate catalytic species back to its active state, continuing the cycle.  Once this was achieved, the effect of water on the system was analyzed.  This was done by adding water in small increments and taking the cyclic voltammogram at each of these points.

Once I began to conduct experiments on my own, I realized how large the learning curve can be.  I watched and learned as carefully as I could, but that is far from the same as doing it on my own.  I figured out that any small error in the way the equipment or software is set up can completely skew the data that is being collected.  Things of this nature happened many times, but I learned so much about the principles of electrochemistry and how to properly conduct experiments through the trial and error that I went through.  This meant that it took me a lot longer than expected to start to get reproducible data. Through these struggles, my mentor and the graduate students in the lab helped me out so much.  If I ever had a question, I knew I had multiple people that I could count on to help me find an answer, and this has been crucial in my growth throughout this process.

The next step in my research will be to further study the catalytic properties of phosphomolybdic acid under different conditions, such as varying pH levels and solvents.  This will be done to find the ideal catalytic conditions for the following experiments, which are the synthesis of a β-O-4 surrogate compound and stoichiometric and catalytic reactions of phosphomolybdic acid using the formed surrogate compound will be analyzed in the future.