Sivaguru Jayaraman, NDSU associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has received a three-year, $429,500 award from the National Science Foundation to conduct research outlined in his proposal titled “Light Induced Enantiospecific Chiral Transfer in Solution.” The funding also provides research opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students to develop environmentally benign, green strategies to perform chemical reactions.

The research program in Jayaraman’s group focuses on using light to transfer molecular chirality in photochemical reactions to produce molecules that are chiral and make only one of the two possible forms. Based on the funding from the National Science Foundation, his research group will study light-induced enantiospecific chiral transfer in solution. One of the research goals is to gain a fundamental understanding of interaction of light with photoreactive substrates, coupled with an intricate control over molecular reactivity, dynamics and non-bonding interactions to enhance stereoselectivity in the photoproducts.

With the most recent funding, students involved in the proposed investigations will learn both traditional techniques to characterize and evaluate asymmetric induction during enantiospecific phototransformations and modern spectroscopic methods and characterization techniques to assess excited state reactivity.

The award is a renewal grant of Jayaraman’s CAREER award, which includes research opportunities for NDSU students. The research in Jayaraman’s proposal is funded by National Science Foundation award No. CHE-1213880.

NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.