Kimberly is a sophomore chemistry major at the University of California, Los Angeles. She
recently joined Dr. Paula Diaconescu’s lab where she is part of the NSR center efforts. She is
helping in researching the formation of polymers through redox-switchable catalysts.
Redox- switchable catalysts is a method that can generate and control numerous active species
with different reactivity. This method helps control the sequence and regularity that can affect
the material properties of copolymer building blocks. It is important to use switchable catalysts
since they have the ability to imitate the two biological processes called spatial and temporal
control. Redox- switchable polymerization catalysts give us the opportunity to synthesize
multiblock copolymers that are prepared from biodegradable materials which are inexpensive.
The goal of this lab is to switch a catalyst form between their oxidation state and their reduced
state to ultimately create a compound that demonstrates orthogonal reactivity for different
substrates and give catalysts the ability to reduce. Overall, with the development of redoxswitchable
catalysts we can look forward to new materials and reactions and can expect the
expanding of switchable polymerization .
Kimberly would like to thank the Diaconescu lab for their mentorship and support. She would
also like to thank the CARE Fellows Program for the opportunity.