So naturally the chemistry building was where I wanted to be during my summer of research. Actually crystal engineering is a really useful science. If we study the crystal shapes and properties, we can design useful solids that have the chemical and physical characteristics that we desire. This comes in handy in pharmaceuticals, electronics, and bioengineering. Well, I thought it was sort of neat and was eager to start on my part of the project.
Most crystal engineering is done with hydrogen bonding.
Most of these interactions are formed with nitrogen and iodide. So Dr. Pennington gave me my project with charge transfer reactions and also some work with psuedo-polyiodides that no one else could get to work. A psuedo-polyiodide is a chain of iodide ions with organic iodine containing spacers in between. All the guys told me not to get too hopeful about the results of my project because sometimes it takes months to make one reaction produce good enough crystals for the X-ray machine and sometimes they never work at all. After a while small crystals did for from the evaporating solvents and I was able to sign up for powder time.