Zhenxuan Chen

Ph.D. candidate in Pharmaceutical Sciences, UW-Madison

B.S. in Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China, 2016

Molecular glasses are important for many applications ranging from cell phone displays to drug delivery. They are commonly treated as isotropic materials with disordered structure. But more and more cases of polyamorphism, which means different structures of amorphous phase of the same content, have challenged the notion of structure of amorphous materials. My research focuses on solving the structure of molecular glasses using state-of-the-art synchrotron X-ray scattering measurements and solid-state NMR spectroscopy. One of my projects focuses on solving the structures of a high-density-liquid and a low-density-liquid of a simple sugar alcohol D-mannitol. The fundamental understanding of polyamorphism will help to create new glasses and control their stability. Another project is to control the molecular orientation in liquid crystal (LC) glasses by cooling the hot liquid at different rates. The LC order trapped I glasses is controlled by the kinetic arrest of the end-over-end molecular rotation. This provides a general strategy to tune the molecular packing in electronic devices.