KINGSTON, R.I. – Dec. 1, 2025 – Two University of Rhode Island chemistry professors each secured five-year, $875,000 U.S. Department of Energy grants for their ongoing work on fundamental bonding between thorium and uranium and to better understand chemical reactions at the water’s surface to both help improve air quality and unlock new chemical synthesis strategies.

Daniel Huh and Daniel Thomas received awards from the DOE’s Early Career Research Program, which launched in January 2025 to support research from outstanding scientists early in their careers, in the Basic Energy Sciences division. 

Heavy element chemistry is a subsect of the BES in which researchers focus on fundamental actinide chemistry that looks at bimetallic actinide. An actinide is a heavy element located at the bottom of the periodic table and many of the fundamental chemistries of these elements are not well understood. 

“There’s a lot that could be done to understand how these metals behave when bonded,” Huh said.

Huh’s research at URI will focus on the elements thorium and uranium and the fundamental metal-metal bonding in multi-metallic molecules. Because there is so little known about actinide chemistry, much of the research is foundational, and geared toward educating the public. 

“We are a synthesis lab at URI, which means we use synthetic techniques to construct these molecules. Once we construct them, we measure them and use techniques such as crystallography and spectroscopy to understand their physical properties,” said Huh.

(Crystallography is the study of crystal structures that reveals the atomic and molecular arrangement within a crystalline solid. Spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between light and matter, used to determine a chemical compound’s physical properties.)

Thomas says the goal of his grant-funded work is to further accelerate the study of chemical reactions of molecules that are controlled within a mass spectrometer–an analytical instrument that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of charged particles, or ions. He says the DOE is interested in seeing how molecules are processed in the atmosphere, including those generated by combustion.

Thomas, over the long term, hopes to leverage this technology in making biological-based energy sources; in other words, making fuels from things that normally just get thrown out, such as from parts of plants that people don’t eat.

“There’s been a lot of evidence in the last few years that there are some unique reactions where you can make reactions occur in this environment that are very energetically unfavorable normally,” Thomas said. “That means you can do things such as break down bonds that typically are very hard to break and we want to know why that is happening.”

Huh says radioactivity is in part why chemists have faced challenges in studying actinide chemistry. However, capabilities have been developed over many years to allow chemists to safely study elements such as neptunium and plutonium. He says collaborative partners, including those at the University of Missouri and the Colorado School of Mines, will assist him and his team in safely studying these highly radioactive elements in their equipped laboratories. 

Huh’s team will also include two graduate students, and eventually one undergraduate student once research is underway. They plan to collaborate with the Los Alamos National Lab, which will assist with theory and computational calculations, and frequent partner, Brown University and its instrumentation. 

For Thomas’ work, he says his team will spend the first year of the grant program doing preliminary experiments and building up new capabilities in its instrumentation based on how molecules react during testing. 

“Then, we’re going to see how that influences the structure of that molecule, the chemical reactivity of that molecule, and then we’re also going to start building some new parts of our instrument that will add on abilities to add in reactive gases into our system,” Thomas said, “so we can study the reactions between gases and molecules that are surrounded by water.”

Thomas’ team will have two URI graduate students and between one and two undergraduate students per year conducting research in labs, constructing instrumentation and performing experiments.

This press release was written in part by Paige Monopoli, communications coordinator for the University of Rhode Island College of Arts and Sciences.