From the February 2018 Desktop News | Every year the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry selects two students from across the country as recipients for a travel grant to attend and present research at The National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. One of the two students selected for the 2018 conference is UA’s very own, Louis “Chip” Reisman.

“I was honestly really surprised when I won the award,” Reisman said. “I felt like I had a strong application, but I was competing against graduate students all across the country for one of two awards. My advisor, Dr. Paul Rupar, always tells me that you get zero percent of the funding that you don’t apply for, so I went for it.”

Reisman is, by training, a synthetic polymer chemist, and is currently a doctoral student in chemistry. He specializes in polyimines, or compounds with more than one amino group.

“These polymers are very difficult to make, but are important because they have a wide range of applications: carbon dioxide capture, antimicrobial coatings, chelation (removing metals from water), material templating, and gene transfection and drug delivery,” Reisman said.

Some applications of this research could prove to advance fields of medicine and environmental science. This very research is what caught the interest of the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry and is the topic Reisman will be presenting at the conference in New Orleans. The conference hosts over 15,000 attendees from around the world and will take place in March 2018.

“After completing my research here at UA, I’m hoping to conduct post-doctoral research on sustainable polymers. Eventually, I would like to become a professor and run my own research group focusing on both bio renewable and biodegradable polymers.”