Organic Chemistry Seminar (Postdoc)
About
Cris Woroch, Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow, UC BerkeleyPolymer design with new monomers & post-polymerization modificationsPolymeric materials are essential for modern life, but current production and disposal methods pose significant environmental harm. Most commodity polymers are constructed from a small set of petrochemical precursors that are non-renewable, are carbon-intensive to produce, yield materials that are challenging to recycle, and offer limited chemical diversity. My work focuses on designing new materials from renewable feedstocks and new methods to upcycle the materials used today. I will present recent work on the construction of new materials from lignocellulose-based furfural and carbon dioxide and the selective oxidation of polyethylene surfaces. In each, I will highlight how careful control of polymer microstructure yields new properties not met by commodity materials.Biography: Cristián (Cris) Woroch is originally from Oakland, California. He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Pomona College, where he worked as a Beckman Scholar with Prof. Nicholas Ball to develop SuFEx methods for medicinal chemistry. In 2019, he moved to Stanford University for his graduate studies with Prof. Matthew Kanan. In his Ph.D. work, he developed new methods of synthesizing performance-advantaged polymers from lignocellulose and carbon dioxide as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and Center for Molecular Analysis and Design (CMAD) Fellow. During his graduate studies, he also worked at the National Laboratory of the Rockies in the BOTTLE Consortium under Dr. Gregg Beckham as a DOE Science Graduate Research Fellow and at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly known as Google X) as a Ph.D. Resident in plastics recycling on Project Materra. Currently, he is an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley with Prof. John Hartwig, where he studies catalytic post-polymerization modification approaches for polymer upcycling.The Organic Seminar Series is sponsored by the William G. Dauben lecture fund
