Myles Drance, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Received ACS Petroleum Research Fund Grant
Myles Drance, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, is the recipient of an American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund (PRF) grant for his project entitled “Upconversion of Feedstock Chemicals by Iron in a Strong Ligand Field.” He is one of 80 new grants recommended by the ACS PRF Committee from the most recent application cycle.
Myles’s research is focused on developing new iron-based catalysts for upgrading liquid alkanes, a major component of petroleum. Liquid alkanes are some of our most abundant and least expensive organic resources. Unfortunately, alkanes are also notoriously difficult to functionalize and are typically burned as fuel rather than used in synthetic chemistry. This grant project seeks to develop new iron-based catalysts for the upgrading of these feedstock chemicals to more synthetically useful, and therefore valuable, products