Matthew J Nava
As an undergraduate, Matt worked in the lab of Christopher Reed at the University of California, Riverside exploring the chemistry of icosahedral boron clusters and reactive cations. There, he prepared for the first time, the strongest known Brønsted acid, H[CHB11F11] and used it to protonate weak bases such as alkanes. After acquiring a masters degree at UCR, Matt went on to obtain his PhD with Christopher Cummins at MIT. At MIT, he honed his synthetic inorganic chemistry skills developing and exploring the chemistry of supramolecular architectures capable of acting as anion receptors and ligands for first row-transition metals in a protected cavity. This work led to fundamental insight into the degradation processes occurring in lithium-air batteries. Besides synthetic work, he also integrated spectroscopic techniques such as Laser-Induced Fluorescence, microwave spectroscopy, and molecular beam mass spectrometry to investigate reactive and short-lived molecules including phosphinidenes and the biologically important signaling molecule, HSNO. As a postdoctoral fellow, Matt started a new collaborative effort between the labs of Daniel Nocera and Daniel Kahne at Harvard to study the rate of formation of the outermost membrane of Gram-negative bacteria.