Bio:
Hiya! My name is Tiffany and I'm a third-year graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering here at Cornell University. I grew up in Southeastern Virginia and earned my B.S. in Chemistry from the College of William and Mary in 2009. That fall, I started graduate school but within a year I found that I needed a break (as I had been busy with classes, work, and extracurricular activities nonstop since I started college) so I took a leave of absence and worked as an analytical chemist in an environmental testing lab here in Tompkins County. I performed over 15 different assays to assess water quality of samples from households, businesses, and from local streams/lakes. I found the job to be super interesting, but after a while I found myself wanting something more so about a year later, I returned to Cornell and started working on my current research project.
In my spare time, I enjoy gardening, hiking, and working on various art projects. I've recently taken up painting, but I find my heart lies with collage and photography. I have two cats, Cosmo (a mischievous brown tabby) and Betsy (a mustachioed calico) who like to watch videos of other cats on the internet. I also enjoy long walks on the beach, but am not much of a fan of piña coladas or getting caught in the rain.
Research summary:
Freeze-casting is a novel method that allows for the formation of 3D interconnected structures from a colloidal suspension. Essentially, the suspension is frozen at a known rate and the water is freeze-dried from the structure, leaving behind a negative replica of the ice phase that formed during freezing. This method is an incredibly straightforward way of generating complex morphologies in water-soluble materials, and so there has been much interest in applying this method to systems comprised of ceramic nanoparticles, polymers, and even biomolecules.
My work is concerned with developing methods for freeze-casting a conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS, which creates a network of pores and increased surface area in the material. The porosity is important in applications where a liquid or gas of interest is to be introduced into the polymer pore network. Increased surface area is useful for applications where PEDOT:PSS is used as an adsorbent or as a detector of various compounds.
Recently, I have begun collaborating with Dave Moore, a former GK12 fellow, of the Hanrath group here at Cornell to make freeze-cast PEDOT:PSS films for photovoltaic devices. Thin films of freeze-cast PEDOT:PSS, when combined with a complementary semiconductor material, is a good template for bulk heterojunction solar cells – devices in which two semiconductor materials share an interface with high surface area, leading to increases in efficiency.
I am also interested in using freeze-cast PEDOT:PSS in devices called supercapacitors. Supercapacitors store large amounts of energy that can be released quickly, when needed. Because PEDOT:PSS is able to undergo oxidation/reduction (redox) reactions, it is able to store electrochemical energy in this type of device. We believe that increasing the surface area of PEDOT:PSS by freeze-casting will greatly enhance device capacitance. Additionally, we are able to easily load nanoparticles made of RuO2 – a material that also has high capacitance – into PEDOT:PSS using the freeze-casting method. This will also help to increase the amount of energy that may be stored (per unit volume) in these materials.