The 2022-2023 academic year saw Prof. Thompson return from his sabbatical in Jean-François Masson’s lab at the University of Montreal. Getting the lab up and running proved to be a big task. Andrew Luu and Isaiah Lares worked in the lab with Prof. Thompson during the academic year exploring polymeric modifications of nanoparticles surface chemistry.
In November of 2022, Prof. Thompson went to Princeton University to pick up a new to us TEM that was donated to Gettysburg thanks to the work of alum Lou Germinario. The new TEM now lives in the Imaging Suite and is a significant upgrade over our previous TEM.
Prof. Thompson spoke at two conferences this year. In the fall, he spoke at the South Eastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemistry Society meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico on some of the curricular developments that the department has put into place in the last couple of years. In the spring, he joined the other members of the department at the ACS national meeting in Indianapolis where he spoke about the groups work on assembling gold nanorods.
The summer of 2023 saw Hana Konno, Ziang Wang, and Isaiah Lares join the lab for the summer X-SIG research program. As part of the summer research, the group participated in the Primarily Undergraduate Nanomaterials Cooperative weekly virtual meetings. In addition, the group went up to the Materials Characterization Lab at Penn State to use one of their fancy Scanning Electron Microscopes and to get some ice cream at the creamery.