Email: [email protected]

Status: 2nd Year Graduate Student

Undergraduate Institution: The University of Texas at Austin

Polyolefins are a ubiquitous class of polymers including commonly known plastics such as polyethylene and polypropylene. Although their highly tailorable properties and cheap feedstocks have found them many applications, polyolefins suffer from difficulty in recyclability. Having all-carbon backbones, they are not labile to chemical recycling, and mechanical recycling of polyolefins typically produces lower-value products than the original plastics due to the mixing of different grades of material.

Recently, the Chirik Group in Princeton’s Chemistry Department developed an iron-based catalyst with the remarkable ability to oligomerize butadiene into telechelic oligomers called divinyloligocyclobutanes (DVOCB) that are polymerizable via their terminal vinyl groups with acyclic diene metathesis (ADMET) and can revert back into butadiene gas over the aforementioned catalyst under vacuum. This opens up the possibility of producing plastics that can be upcycled back into their original monomers at ends of their lifecycles while still ultimately being sourced from cheap petroleum feedstocks. In my research, I hope to produce a variety of copolymers incorporating DVOCBs and to investigate their structure-property relationships.