Laboratory Manager/Administrator: Rebecca Stillo

The Mason Group applies the tools of coordination chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology to the synthesis of materials that address basic science challenges in energy and sustainable development.  A particular emphasis is on the development of chemical strategies to manipulate entropy, phase transitions, and porosity at different length scales in new classes of inorganic-organic materials.  Our laboratory is, for instance, designing dense, crystalline solids that undergo reversible, high-enthalpy phase transitions as advanced materials for thermal energy storage.

Additional efforts in the group are directed at the design, synthesis, and characterization of new classes of porous materials that feature fundamentally new behaviors and previously inaccessible functionalities. Example projects include: the development of liquids with intrinsic microporosity; self-cooling adsorbents; and nanocrystal-based porous frameworks. Students in the Mason Group receive extensive training in synthetic chemistry and the use of a broad range of analytical tools, including diffraction, adsorption, electron microscopy, calorimetry, and various spectroscopic techniques.

Jarad joined the CCB faculty in January 2018. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 under the guidance of Jeffrey Long.  Following Berkeley, Jarad was a Dan David Prize and International Institute for Nanotechnology postdoctoral fellow with Chad Mirkin at Northwestern University.