Lecture on How Porous Organic Polymers Represent New Class of Nanoporous Materials

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences presents professor Shengqian Ma from the University of South Florida. His lecture on "Task-Specific Design and Functionalization of Advanced Porous Organic Polymers for Environmental Remediation" will be at 3:30 p.m., Monday, Sept. 10, in the Chemistry Building, room 144.

Ma's lecture will cover how porous organic polymers (POPs), both amorphous and crystalline, represent an emerging class of nanoporous materials, and they feature robust covalent framework structures with high water and chemical stability. This, together with their high surface areas and tunable pore sizes, makes them hold promise for a variety of applications. He will demonstrate how POPs can be task-specific designed and functionalized via either de novel synthesis or stepwise post-synthetic modification for applications in environmental remediation including oil spill cleanup, heavy metal removal, and nuclear waste treatment.

Shengqian Ma obtained his B.S. from Jilin University, China, in 2003 and graduated from Miami University, Ohio, with a Ph.D. in 2008. After finishing a two-year Director's Postdoctoral Fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined the Department of Chemistry at University of South Florida as an assistant professor in August 2010. He was promoted to an associate professor with early tenure in 2015 and to a full professor in 2018.

He received the USF Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award in 2015 and the USF Outstanding Faculty Award in 2018. He is the recipient of 2014 NSF CAREER Award and has been selected as the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017; he was also awarded the IUPAC-2015 Young Chemist Travel Award and the 2009 IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists from International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC); he received the Young Investigator Award from American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry and the Director's Postdoctoral Fellowship from Argonne National Laboratory in 2008 as well.

His current research interest focuses on the development of functional porous materials including metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous organic polymers (POPs), and microporous carbon materials for energy, biological, and environmental-related applications. He has published more than 150 papers with the total citations over 15,000 and the H-index of 62.