My very first science fair project, completed in the spring of my seventh grade year, dealt with the harmful effects of acid rain on a variety of common transition metals. This project laid the foundation of my dual interests in inorganic transition metal chemistry and the environmental applications of chemistry. One year later, my research switched gears towards the medical applications of transition metal chemistry. I devised an original recipe for baking powder by eliminating a standard ingredient, sodium aluminum sulfate, which has been identified as a possible chemical trigger of Alzheimer’s disease, and replacing it with a variety of transition metal compounds that are essential to the body. Entering high school, I naturally wanted to combine my interests in both environmental and medical issues while still focusing on the area of inorganic/transition metal chemistry . . . I was pointed in the direction of green chemistry, a sub-field of chemistry that combined my two interests perfectly. Green chemistry, at its core, is a field aimed at creating, from the ground up, specialized catalysts, chemical agents, reactions, and other processes that minimize or even eliminate toxicity and harm to the environment and human health. Given these ambitious aims, a large part of green chemistry involves novel synthesis of various compounds that can potentially end up as important catalysts in a variety of important reactions. This is the vein of green chemistry my project fell into: the synthesis of novel complexes (and useful catalysts) using the metal rhodium. The catalytic activity of the complexes was discovered after a series of tests, and I found them especially pertinent to pharmaceutical synthesis reactions.

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• Chemistry