Greg larsen

Born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Greg joins the group after earning a BS in physics from Rice University. While at Rice, he was honored for his senior research project on carbon nanotube characterization via Raman spectroscopy. Though early in his career, his ultimate motivation is to develop the technology to create an environmentally friendly and secure energy future. Outside of academics, Greg enjoys rock climbing, running, fly fishing, and playing the guitar.

Greg is currently working in collaboration with Dr. Flor Siperstein and Dr. Peter Budd from the University of Manchester to study a new class of polymers, polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIMs). Most polymers, due to their highly flexible backbones pack together into dense and often crystalline systems and until recently have not been considered as adsorbents. PIMs, recently developed by Budd and McKeown, derive their porosity from their rigid and contorted structure. Several different species of PIMs have been synthesized with varying chemistries and geometries, but all follow the same structural scheme of rigid backbone sections connected by rigid and nonlinear linking units. The potential for industrial scalability and adaptable chemistry using light elements give PIMs an enormous potential for a broad range of applications from gas storage (pictured: N2 gas adsorbed into PIM-1) to fluid filtration.