James Flanagan

James Flanagan

New Materials from Organic Wastes
Cohort
2016
Graduation Year
2016

Mentors: Craig Criddle and Robert Waymouth

Biography

I am a PhD candidate in the Waymouth Group in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford. I graduated from Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, with first class honors MSci in Chemistry, where I worked on selective aerobic alcohol oxidations with Dr Mark Muldoon and Dr Matthew Cook. Prior to that I had placements in corporate research at Sika AG, in Zurich, Switzerland and at the School of Pharmacy at Queen’s, Belfast. Outside of the lab I enjoy playing the violin in symphony orchestras, and am a keen follower of soccer and all things Liverpool FC.

Research Summary

Creating sustainable materials of the future, particularly from non-petroleum based sources, is an area that urgently requires innovation. The methane generated at landfills is allowed to escape to the atmosphere and contributes to greenhouse gas warming, and methane that is produced during the anaerobic digestion of organic wastes is often underutilized. By combining the environmental engineering expertise of the Criddle lab with concepts in catalysis and synthetic chemistry developed by the Waymouth lab, we aim to exploit such waste streams to generate new families of sustainable plastics.

Under the right conditions, self-assembled microbial communities can use biogas methane, or waste organic matter, to produce significant quantities of poly(hydroxyalkanoate)s (PHAs): thermopolymers that can be purified and used to make bio-based materials. Furthermore, these PHAs can be degraded into acrylic-type C4 carbon sources. There are opportunities to develop novel methods to convert these sustainable C4 sources into not only new chemical intermediates, but also into new, higher-value and more robust materials. 

Some products derived from the degradation of PHAs have surprisingly limited polymerization chemistry developed to date. An example of this is crotonates, being less reactive than their more famous methacrylate isomeric cousins. However, by applying concepts in molecular design and catalysis, our preliminary results show that there is considerable promise for converting the products of PHA degradation into well-defined polymers.