PhD in Chemical and Materials Sciences

Contacts

Supervisor

Research activities

My research activities are focused on the following tasks:

• Synthesis and characterization of novel solid-state forms of commercially available drugs, in order to improve the physicochemical properties of pharmaceuticals such as water solubility, thermal stability, and to prevent undesirable polymorphic behaviors;
• Synthesis and characterization of novel crystalline materials using the halogen bonding interaction, which possesses promising applications in many fields, such as medicinal chemistry, catalysis, optics and optoelectronics;
• Use of Multinuclear Solid-State Magnetic Resonance techniques to characterize solid materials by the quantification of their components at a molecular level, and the elucidation of structure and bonding.

My current projects:

• Synthesis of novel pharmaceutical and functional solids by a crystal engineering approach, using hydrogen and halogen bonding as driving forces to assembly molecular building blocks;
• Multinuclear Solid-State Magnetic Resonance techniques for detecting and measuring the strength of intermolecular forces responsible for crystal packing;
• Zero Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (also referred to as Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance, NQR) to directly investigate covalently-bonded quadrupolar nuclei in novel crystalline solids;
• Ab-initio quantum chemical calculations as guidance and support for a thorough elucidation of line shapes in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectra.