Philip Grandinetti received his B.S in chemistry in 1982 and M.S. in physical chemistry in 1984 at West Virginia University under Professor Nar S. Dalal. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1989 under Professor Jiri Jonas at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From 1989 to 1993 he was a post-doctoral researcher with Professor Alex Pinesat the University of California, Berkeley, and during that period was an NIH postdoctoral fellow. He came to Ohio State University as an assistant Professor in 1993, was promoted to associate Professor in 1999, and full Professor in 2005. He received the NSF CAREER award in 1995 and an NSF Creativity Award in 2004. He was a visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in 1999, a visiting Professor and Le Studium Researcher at the CNRS, Orléans, France in 2005-06, and the Allan Cox Visiting Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University in 2009.   He is a council member of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. 

Our research program centers on the development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) methodology and its application to areas such as materials chemistry, environmental chemistry and geochemistry, and biophysics.

1. New techniques in Solid-State NMR
   

   Our group focuses on designing and improving solid-state NMR techniques for quadrupolar nuclei (Spin > 1/2). Quadrupolar nuclei comprise nearly 70% of the periodic table. Over the last decade solid-state NMR of quadrupolar nuclei has undergone a renaissance with a number of new techniques for obtaining high resolution isotropic spectra of quadrupolar nuclei. While all these techniques are welcome additions to the solid-state NMR spectroscopist's toolbox, the inherently low sensitivity of many quadrupolar nuclei still remains an obstacle to their full exploitation.

   Over the last few years our lab has developed two new approaches for enhancing the sensitivity of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of quadrupolar nuclei: FASTER (FAst Spinning gives Transfer Enhancement at Rotary resonance) and RAPT (Rotor Assisted Population Transfer), both described in this proposal. While we have shown that enhancements obtained with these new methods can be as high as an order of magnitude, the full potential of these techniques is yet to be determined. Lacking any simple analytical theory for the mechanism behind these approaches, our quantum mechanical density matrix numerical simulations, coupled with experimental verifications, have become the most effective way to understand and optimize these new methods. The ongoing work in our lab has focused on performing a more complete numerical exploration of the nuclear spin response to the possible experimental conditions associated with the RAPT and FASTER methods. The results of these investigations will not only improve our understanding of the mechanism behind these methods, but will assist in developing more robust excitation schemes.

2. Structure of Non-crystalline Inorganic Oxides
   

   Although modern molecular modeling and molecular dynamics simulation approaches have been valuable tools for investigating structure/property relationships in non-crystalline materials their predictive capabilities have been hampered by a lack of experimental data to confirm the bases of their structural models. Our group and many others have shown over the last decade that two-dimensional solid-state NMR applied to glasses can provide a new wealth of structural data previously thought unattainable by NMR. The main objectives of this work is to apply two-dimensional solid-state NMR methods, including versions enhanced using RAPT and FASTER, in the measurement of structural distributions in glasses, and to develop O-17 solid-state NMR as a probe of oxygen coordination number and geometry in inorganic oxide materials.

   Financial support for our research comes primarily from the National Science Foundation.  Recent members of the Grandinetti group now hold research positions in the national labs at the CNRS in France and the USDA; academics positions at Ohio State University and Marshall University; as well as industrial positions at Xerox, BASF, Motorola, Saudi Aramco, Lockheed Martin, and Proctor and Gamble.

   Philip Grandinetti will be taking on graduate students and welcomes inquires regarding all openings in his group.