Research Projects

NMR spectroscopy is a powerful tool in elucidating structures of organic molecules. It also frequently used in reaction monitoring in order to gain an insight of the mechanism of organic reactions. However, it is often not sufficient to investigate reaction mechanisms using only one type of spectroscopy due to the intricacy of mechanisms in general and the ambiguity in interpreting results. In an attempt to tackle reaction mechanisms on a broader scale, we combine UV/vis and NMR spectroscopy. These often give complementary information on the reaction, thus allowing for better interpretation of results and proposition of possible reaction mechanisms. For this, we use an in-house built setup that makes it possible to measure NMR and UV/vis spectra at the same time on the same sample.

The research project will focus on reaction monitoring of a model reaction using NMR and UV/vis spectroscopy and the combination of both techniques. The resulting spectra will be interpreted with the goal of proposing a (partial) reaction mechanism in the context of literature.

This Project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Christina M. Thiele.