A Six-Week Student-Led Project Designed to Provide Insight into Modern Photochemistry Research

An advanced chemistry laboratory project has been developed to introduce final year undergraduate students to organic photocatalyst design using benzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazole (BTZ) photocatalysts, prepared via a single Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling from cheap starting materials, as the example. This project took on a research lab style structure, and over the course of 6 weeks students were tasked to (1) synthesize and study the photophysical properties of three BTZ-based photocatalysts; (2) apply the BTZ photocatalysts to a test photoredox reaction using cheap home-built LEDs, and (3) perform rudimentary computational calculations to rationalize key experimental results.

Reference

Dominic Taylor, Leonardo Amicosante, Luize M. Luse, Martin R. S. McCoustra, Lee McMahon, Scott J. Dalgarno, Filipe Vilela, J. Chem. Ed., 2025, doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c01241