Chemist wins Fulbright scholarship

Massey University scientist Dr Shane Telfer has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright New Zealand Senior Scholar Award to study at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr Telfer, a senior lecturer in chemistry at the Institute of Fundamental Sciences, says the award will build upon his Marsden Fund work into porous metal-organic frameworks.

“There are lots of potential applications for these materials that rely on their porosity,” he says. “At Berkeley they are really interested in carbon dioxide capture. If you make enough of these materials you may be able to put them in an industrial smokestack, for instance, and filter out the carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.”

The captured carbon dioxide could then be transferred into some kind of storage tanks to be used in another way, rather than contribute to global warming.

Dr Telfer says his team is interested in using the materials they are making in a similar way, and his award will provide the opportunity to test them using Berkeley’s experimental set-up.

“They have the facilities to measure the absorption capacity of the materials, and also the expertise to analyse and interpret the data.”

The metal-organic frameworks are a type of molecular scaffold, which have both a metal and organic component. “The metal ions hold these organic ligands together,” he says. “But they do so in a very open way, so guest molecules can come in and interact in the cavities. So that’s really interesting for lots of different applications.”

The carbon dioxide is only weakly bound to the framework so once it is full the gas can be removed and the framework re-used.

Dr Telfer, who will take up the award in April, says it provides an exciting opportunity to work in one of the highest ranked chemistry faculties in the United States. As well as spending three months in California, he will also conduct a lecture tour, visiting universities across the country.