Fry-Petit, Allyson M.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Biography:

Dr. Fry-Petit obtained her bachelor of arts in chemistry and critical thought and inquiry from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. She obtained her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, advised by Dr. Patrick Woodward. Fry-Petit's graduate work focused on controlling the ordering of the polar building units MO3F3 (M=Mo, W). She then went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, to be a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Dr. Tyrel McQueen. There she focused the majority of her work on the development and use of dynamic pair distribution function (DPDF) analysis. The Fry-Petit lab is a solid state inorganic lab that focuses on rational material design. This is done by approaching the correlations between the structure and property of materials in three ways. The first aim of our research is to use data mining to better understand the structural driving forces of material properties. This data-driven process guides our second aim of synthesis and characterization of materials, both novel and known. Results from data mining have shown that many structures that were structurally characterized previously are not fully understood; improvements in instrumentation will allow us to structurally characterize those materials and finally correlate their properties to structurally related materials. A foundation to understanding structure-property relations is correctly assigning the structure of a material, which will be done using in house powder x-ray diffraction, synchrotron diffraction, and neutron diffraction. Optical and vibrational properties of the materials will be probed spectroscopically in house using reflectance, fluorescence, infrared, and Raman. The third aim is to continue the development of a vibrational probe, neutron dynamic pair distribution function analysis (DPDF).

Areas of Knowledge:

• Solid state inorganic chemistry
• X-ray diffraction
• Neutron diffraction
• Structure-property relationships
• Polar materials

Subject(s):

• Chemistry

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