‘Virtues of taking a risk’ helps shape a young scholar
February 12, 2021
UGA Distinguished Professor pays tribute to one of his inspirations
Gregory Robinson. (Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA)
Gregory H. Robinson, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, wrote and published a scholarly tribute to Professor Jerry L. Atwood, who “inspired a generation of chemists to indulge their imaginations and to take risks in their pursuit of chemistry,” including Robinson:
The most consequential friendship of my life inauspiciously began on a cold, late-November evening in 1979, in Jacksonville, Alabama. Of course, I did not see it coming. I was studying chemistry at Jacksonville State University, slated to graduate with my B.S. in April 1980. Having recently fulfilled my four-year Gamecock football obligations, I was enjoying for the first time the freedom to fully concentrate on my studies. As the newly elected p
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Using a technique they developed in 2008, the
University of Georgia
team succeeded in isolating silicon oxide fragments for the first time, at room temperature, by trapping them between stabilizing organic bases. Silicon monoxide is the most abundant silicon oxide in the universe but, terrestrially it is only persistent at high temperatures, about 1,200 degrees Celsius. Naturally abundant silica ((SiO2)n) exists on Earth as sand; a network solid wherein each silicon atom bonds to four oxygen atoms in a process that repeats infinitely.
A new paper reports two new compounds containing Si2O3 and Si2O4 cores that the team was able to isolate using the carbene stabilization technique. This synthetic strategy allowed the team to tame the highly reactive silicon oxide moieties at room temperature, a discovery which breaks open an area of chemistry where difficulty with synthetics has limited the research activity. Silicon-oxide materials are found in every electronic device and c