Subhradeep Mistry, Ph.D 

As an experimental chemist, the first thing I love is mixing chemicals to form new crystalline multi-dimensional inorganic-organic hybrid materials. It's truly a joyous journey from mixing the right chemicals, solvents, setting an ideal condition, and patiently watching the growth of tiny crystals on the edge of the culture tubes. My focus is to synthesize new metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) or coordination polymers (CPs) and study their structure-property relationship. 

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MOFs are a unique class of porous materials that are synthesized using metal ions which acts as a node and organic linkers. By judicious selection of organic linkers, one can control or design the final structure of MOFs as well as their porosity. Its properties can further be tuned by pre-designing or post-synthetic modifications. These features make MOFs an ideal choice for the development of multifunctional materials.

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A sizable portion of my research work was studying the magnetic behaviour of azido bridged coordination polymer (CP) compounds. Paramagnetic metals [such as Cu(II) and Ni(II)] centers connected with small linkers like azido forms coordination polymers of various dimensionality. Due to the diverse bridging modes of azides often metal centers form metal clusters which are further interconnected with azides to form the overall structure. Different aliphatic multidentate amines were employed to restrict the dimensionality. These compounds showed diverse magnetic behaviour for example ferromagnetism, anti-ferromagnetism and metamagnetism. 

 

Another part of my research work was focused on exploring the catalytic, separation, and proton conductive properties of MOFs. In two separate studies, we concluded that MOFs could exhibit bifunctionality (Lewis acidity and basicity) to catalyse tandem reactions (even in a solvent-free condition) and multi-component reactions. These processes are more atom-economic, sustainable, and greener. Our search towards finding better MOF based catalysts is still ongoing. 

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In a separate study, with a porous CP, we demonstrated selective separation of aliphatic nitriles.  More interestingly, it can absorb cis-crotononitrile selectively from the cis-trans mixture as well as a mixture containing the structural isomers (allylnitrile). In addition, during my doctoral period, I also worked on sensing, transformation, and proton conductivity by employing some of the newly synthesized MOFs.

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In future, I will target my research works in the following areas.

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A) My research focus would be to stabilize new porous magnetic as well as semiconductor MOFs, separately, and understanding their structure-property relationship. In another part, I would attempt to stabilize new MOF materials with magnetoelectric properties. The porosity of MOFs can be exploited to prepare multifunctional materials.

B) I would try to synthesize better porous MOF catalysts which are highly stable at diverse conditions. My goal is to achieve high turnover frequency (TOF) using minimum chemical and energy for a reaction with the catalyst.