Soft Surfaces on Hard Materials: Organic and Inorganic Ligands on Gold Nanocrystals

Please join Yale Chemistry for the 2026-2027 Robert H. Crabtree Lecture in Inorganic Chemistry with Prof. Catherine J. Murphy, Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry, and current Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Summary: Gold nanoparticles have been used since ancient times as colorants in art, and their optical properties, as colloidal spheres, have been classically understood for over a century. Only in the last 30 years have methods been developed to control gold nanocrystalline shape, and the corresponding optical properties have great utility across a broad array of applications. In this talk I will describe our seed-mediated growth approach to the controllable synthesis of colloidal gold nanorods of tunable aspect ratio; reactions at the surface of the gold nanocrystals that enable hard ligand shell or soft ligand shell formation; and many experiments, from NMR to proteomics, that lead to molecular-level understanding of the surface of these nanocrystals in various environments. Such knowledge of the surface connects to the application spaces of imaging, chemical sensing, therapeutics, and catalysis. Bio: Catherine J. Murphy is the Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry, and current Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned two B.S. degrees from UIUC in 1986, one in biochemistry and one in chemistry, and did undergraduate research in the lab of organometallic chemist Tom Rauchfuss. She went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison for graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1990 with Art Ellis. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology with Jackie Barton, she started her independent career at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1993. After rising through the ranks at South Carolina, she was recruited back to UIUC in 2009. She has coauthored 300+ research publications and delivered 500+ invited talks all over the world during the course of her career. She is a coauthor of the bestselling chemistry textbook Chemistry: The Central Science, now in its 15th edition. Murphy has won numerous awards, including the Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2022), the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry (2020), the Remsen Award (2019) and the Linus Pauling Medal (2019). She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For more information on Prof. Murphy's research: Research | Murphy Research Group | Illinois Hosted by Prof. Gary Brudvig.