TCoE Trends Newsletter, Winter 2023
Inexpensive, versatile, pliable, shapeable, and with useful applications in every sector of manufacturing, plastics — synthetic polymers — were a scientific breakthrough that has improved lives since they went into mass production after World War II.
The vision of great swaths of land and sea choked with plastic waste was not in the picture then, but it certainly is now. Hao Sun, Ph.D., an assistant professor of chemistry, sees it, doesn’t like it, and is determined to do something about it. The important grant he just received from the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund will help make that possible.
Sun is the first University of New Haven professor to receive the highly competitive Undergraduate New Investigator Grant from the Fund. Over the next two years, it will support his quest to develop the next generation of polymer materials that are chemically recyclable but have the mechanical and thermal properties that are the upside of current commercial polymers.
Sun’s ambition is to design new polymer structures that will easily depolymerize back into their original monomers — small molecule building blocks —that can then be reused to make a new polymer.
"...research activity at the University is rapidly growing and receiving increasing recognition from several high-impact funding agencies across the nation." Assistant Professor Hao Sun
The students in Sun’s research group will also be the fortunate beneficiaries of the $55,000 grant as they work closely with him in the Advanced Polymer Lab that he founded. The title of the project — “Transformation of Non-Depolymerizable Poly (oxanorbornene)s to Depolymerizable Polyolefins via Ring-Opening of Backbone Cyclic Ethers” — will create opportunities each year for at least five students to gain hands-on research experience.
Sun is excited about the opportunity for his students, for himself, and potentially for society. But the assistant professor, who joined the University in the fall of 2021, is also happy about how the grant reflects on the University of New Haven:
“Together with the University’s other recent successes in securing grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, this suggests the research activity at the University is rapidly growing and receiving increasing recognition from several high-impact funding agencies across the nation,” he enthused.
This story appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of TCoE Trends, the official newsletter of the Tagliatela College of Engineering. Click here to read more from TCoE Trends.
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