Benjamin Manning Email and Phone Number

I am a first year Ph.D. student at the Ohio State University. My primary research interests include organic synthesis and organometallics.I have developed my organic synthesis skills in the Hofferberth laboratory at Kenyon college and the Hadad laboratory at The Ohio State University. I use retrosynthetic analysis to plan reactions schemes for target molecules. These target molecules include isolated enantiomers as precursors for an aldol reaction, a potential fluorophore, and putative small molecule pro-drugs. This synthetic research has developed my laboratory techniques as I meticulously maintain dry, anoxygenic reaction conditions, run careful hand columns to separate stereoisomers and other molecules with similar retention factors, and analyze the one-dimensional and two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of these products. I also have experience with other analytical techniques including TLC, IR spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy, and GCMS.I have also developed skills in nanofabrication through my research in the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Chicago. There, I designed a process to fabricate resonators more quickly which involved spin coating thin films onto silicon substrates, using e-beam lithography to create resonator templates, and depositing dielectric material into the templates using chemical vapor deposition to fabricate resonators. The crux of my research was making the CVD process more conformal to the substrate templates by cycling between etching steps and deposition steps.