Dr. Jessica Heimann is a SCIART Postdoctoral fellow in the Rosenzweig lab, whose research aims to develop advanced spectroscopic and imaging techniques to map fluorescent pigments in works of art, particularly in paintings and works on paper. Furthermore, it will explore the complex relationship between the lifetime/stability of a fluorescent pigment and its chemical environment. Her work in the Rosenzweig Group is funded by the SCIART grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Prior to her time at UMBC, Dr. Heimann received her B.S. in Chemistry from Rice University in 2015 and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Her thesis work, under Dr. Nilay Hazari, focused on understanding the mechanism of carbon dioxide insertion into metal-element sigma-bonds, an elementary reaction proposed in many hydrogenative and dehydrogenative catalytic cycles. Specifically, they elucidated and quantified the effects of the following variables on the rate of carbon dioxide insertion: (1) solvent, (2) Lewis acid additives, (3) ancillary ligand modifications, and (4) the nucleophilicity of E in the M-E bond using rapid mixing stopped-flow techniques.