Classroom Catalyst
Rachel Motz’s trajectory from classroom to laboratory
Rachel Motz’s journey into chemistry research began in her first-year inorganic chemistry class, from which she recalls Professor of Chemistry Stefan Bernhard making an intriguing offer to his students.
“At some point in the class, he mentioned that he would offer the student with the highest grade in the class an opportunity to work in his lab,” Motz said. For Motz, who had been fascinated by chemistry since seventh grade, this seemed like a great if improbable opportunity for a first-year student, but at the end of the semester, she received an email from Bernhard.
“He said ‘you’re that student — what do you think?’ ” Motz said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing but it sounded really cool.”
Motz’s work in Bernhard’s lab has focused on a deceptively simple-sounding goal — producing hydrogen from water using light.
“There’s a lot of different avenues to that,” Motz noted.
As part of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in the Bernhard lab, Motz explored some of those areas before landing on cobalt catalysts, a subset of which are often used in industrial processes. These catalysts could be alternatives to commonly used noble metal catalysts that are rare and expensive, Motz said.
To search for more earth-abundant and thus cheaper catalysts, Motz ended up using a high-throughput, combinatorial process to study 646 possible catalysts for their photocatalytic water reduction ability. While originally thinking that she could submit this work as a short communication to a journal, Motz was encouraged by Bernhard to expand on her work and submit it as a full paper.
The final work on the paper coincided right when the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns hit, Motz recalled, making the process even more daunting than usual. Motz returned home to Seattle, but her graduate student mentor remained in Pittsburgh and her postdoctoral fellow co-author went home to Australia.
“I definitely had to persevere that spring and summer to coordinate the three of us across very different time zones to finish off the writing remotely and get the manuscript submitted by the beginning of the fall,” Motz said.
She ended up having her study published this spring in the journal Inorganic Chemistry, with herself as first author, a rare achievement for an undergraduate researcher.
For Motz, this work reminds her of what first drew her to chemistry in middle school — the ability to focus on how molecules work and interact with each other and how that creates different materials with different properties.
Motz is excited to continue her work in research at MIT this fall, where she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in bioinorganic chemistry.
Outside of research, Motz has been involved with Carnegie Mellon’s Joyful Noise acapella group, the Dancers’ Symposium, been a buggy driver and played in two different wind ensembles on campus. While she can’t continue with buggy, she looks forward to making further use of her musical skills in French horn and trumpet at MIT.
♦ by Ben Panko