The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry hosts guest speaker Professor Nathaniel Rosi, Covestro Endowed Chair of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. His topic will be "Design and Development of NIR Emitting Lanthanide-Based Metal-Organic Frameworks and Their Application to Biological Imaging and Sensing."

The seminar will be preceded by a light reception at 4:30 p.m. in the David Love Lounge.

Sponsored by the Luke E. Steiner Lecture Fund.

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Abstract

This seminar will detail my research group’s development of new classes of near-infrared emitting metal-organic frameworks (NIR MOFs) for application in bioanalysis and biological imaging. Specific challenges in modern biological imaging will be briefly presented, and the benefit of a MOF approach toward building bioanalytical probes that overcome these current challenges will be discussed. I will outline and present several strategies for designing and creating NIR MOFs that exhibit sufficiently bright emission for biological imaging and whose excitation profiles can be carefully tuned and optimized. I will also present a class of ‘turn-on’ molecular sensors that emerged from our fundamental studies on lanthanide sensitization in MOFs.