Specific projects being actively pursued in my research group are listed here. Some projects are done in collaboration with several colleagues at University of Michigan, Northwestern University and Arizona State University.

Low density solids: design and synthesis of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Design of framework structures in which metal oxides clusters act as 'joints' and the organic linkers as 'struts' to produce highly porous crystals (ca. 4,800 m2/g) with the lowest density ever recorded for a crystalline material. These remarkable properties are found to be useful in gas storage, in particular hydrogen and methane storage for fueling automobiles, laptops, cellular phones and other mobile electronics. At present some MOFs are being prepared inexpensively in kilogram quantities.

Hierarchical structures: inorganic tetrahedral frameworks based on metal sulfides. Use of hydrothermal synthesis techniques to synthesize ordered metal sulfide frameworks and polyhedra in which the building blocks progressively increase in size from 5-100 Angstroms without changing their overall tetrahedral geometry. These types of materials have been found to be useful as fast ion-conductors.

Light-weight and resilient organic frameworks. Use of organic synthesis techniques to produce crystals of extended cross-linked polymers for their use as highly selective binding agents, fluorescent tags, and gas sensors.

High-throughput and combinatorial synthesis of materials. Development of the practical aspects of using these techniques in the (a) chemical syntheses of solid state crystalline materials, and (b) their characterization by employing high-throughput X-ray single crystal and powder diffraction techniques.

Material informatics: grammar and taxonomy of the design and construction of extended chemical structures. Given the vast number of structures that could result from assembly of molecular shapes, how do we as designers (a) identify the most important topologies that should be expected to form, (b) determine how are they distributed among known crystal structures, and (c) find means of interpreting, organizing, and classifying this data for the purpose of developing systems of grammar and taxonomy for the design of extended structures, the rationalization of existing structures, and the prediction of new ones.

Biocompatible capsules: protein and metal-peptide functional assemblages. Use of symmetric proteins and peptides to construct porous protein networks and ordered metal-peptide frameworks for their applications to drug transport, sequencing and as sensors.