Bonnie Buss

Post Doc, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2022.
Area of Study: Chemical Engineering

PhD, Colorado State University, 2020.
Area of Study: Materials Chemistry

BSc, University of Arkansas, 2015.
Area of Study: Chemistry

Assistant Professor, University of Northern Colorado
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (2022 – Present)

Degradation of Commodity Waste Plastics Using Light

Light-driven degradation of polystyrene and other common polymers into well-defined products using photocatalysis. Mechanistic and spectroscopic studies will be performed to inform the design of superior catalysts for these transformations.

Design of Immobilized Organic Photoredox Catalysts

Design, synthesis, and characterization of covalently-linked photoredox catalysts onto polymer supports for elucidation of key structure-property relationships as related to photoredox catalysis.

Photoredox-catalyzed Polymerization in an Organic Teaching Laboratory

This work focuses on the adaptation of Organocatalyzed Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization to a method which can be performed in any organic teaching laboratory with readily-available equipment. This laboratory module offers many learning opportunities for undergraduate students in the realms of Green Chemistry, polymer chemistry, and photocatalysis, all of which are relatively underexplored in a practical sense. The goal of this work is to incorporate this into the laboratory curriculum at UNC and to then submit to the Journal of Chemical Education for wider dissemination.