Adam Rowland
Personal History: I am a fourth year graduate student in the Holcombe group. I was born and raised in Texas. The majority of my childhood was in Lake Jackson, which is a bit south of Houston. I did my undergraduate work at Texas A&M University, in College Station. I received my BS in Chemistry in 2004. I now live here in Austin and am enjoying the graduate student life. I married Jessica Daniel (now Rowland) on June 12, 2004. She works with the American Cancer Society here in Austin. |
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Graduate Research Interests
The half of the Holcombe labs where I reside specializes in inductively coupled plasma orthogonal acceleration time of flight mass spectrometry, abbreviated as ICP-oaTOFMS. ICP-MS is one of the standard methods of atomic spectroscopy (but not a form of molecular mass spectrometry).
One of the great advantages of TOF mass spectrometry is the ability to measure nearly all isotopes at all times, with no penalty in duty cycle. The rapid nature of data collection also means that good data can be obtained very quickly, even over very short transient events.
I am combining these system with the unique capabilities of the electothermal vaporizer (ETV) as a means of sample introduction. The ETV is a graphite tube that is heated to extremely high temperatures (around 3000 C). This is hot enough to vaporize most materials, and the vapor can then be sent to the ICP.
Currently, the idea is to use the ETV as a means to separate species that would normally interfere with one another in the mass spectrometer. Once they are separated, they can be analyzed by the spectrometer to give useful data on several isotopes based on the data in the short transient event from the ETV (less than 4 seconds). A potential application is in a faster method of isotopic geochronology.
I attended the 2006 Plasma Spectrochemistry Winter Conference and presented a poster regarding my research so far.I also attended the 2007 FACSS conference where I gave my first talk.
The use of ICP-TOF-MS for isotope ratios has a body of literature demonstrating it to be precise, but difficulties ahve been encountered in obtaining data that is also accurate. Research is underway to find the cause of this problem, and to possibly correct it.
Finally, I work with a variety of people to help them take data by ICP-MS. This includes people from other labs, as well as other members of this group. This resulted in a new method of finding metal chelating peptide covered beads, which has been published.
Publications:
Rowland, Adam, Housh, Todd B., Holcombe, James A.Use of electrothermal vaporization for volatility-based separation of Rb–Sr isobars for determination of isotopic ratios by ICP-MS. JAAS (2008), in press.
Stair, Jacqueline L.; White, Brianna R.; Rowland, Adam; Holcombe, James A. Quantitative determination of single-bead metal content from a peptide combinatorial library. Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry (2006), 8(6), 929-934.
Undergraduate Work
I performed a wide variety of undergraduate research. In the summer of 2002, I did an REU session at Oklahoma State in the McKeever Lab in conjunction with the Arkansas Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Science. In Spring 2003 at A&M, I did some research in the Simanek group on the possible development of an AB4 type dendrimer. From the fall of 2003 to summer of 2004, I worked in the Clearfield labs at A&M. My work was in the synthesis and characterization of high surface area organometallic materials. The first work focused on layered zirconium compounds of alkyl diphosphonates. I later moved into zirconium aryl diphosphonates and some very interesting tin phosphonate compounds.
Resulting publications:
1. McKeever, S. W. S.; Banerjee, D.; Blair, M.; Clifford, S. M.; Clowdsley, M. S.; Kim, S. S.; Lamothe, M.; Lepper, K.; Leuschen, M.; McKeever, K. J.; Prather, M.; Rowland, A.; Reust, D.; Sears, D. W. G.; Wilson, J. W. Concepts and approaches to in situ luminescence dating of martian sediments. Radiation Measurements (2003), 37(4-5), 527-534.
2. Subbiah, Ayyappan; Pyle, David; Rowland, Adam; Huang, Jin; Narayanan, R. Aravinda; Thiyagarajan, P.; Zon, Jerzy; Clearfield, Abraham. A Family of Microporous Materials Formed by Sn(IV) Phosphonate Nanoparticles. Journal of the American Chemical Society (2005), 127(31).
3. Huang, Jin; Subbiah, Ayyappan; Pyle, David; Rowland, Adam; Smith, Brentley; Clearfield, Abraham. Globular Porous Nanoparticle Tin(IV) Phenylphosphonates and Mixed Methyl Phenylphosphonates. Chemistry of Materials (2006), 18(22), 5213-5222
Contact Information
Adam Rowland
1 University Station, A5300
Austin, TX 78712
(512) 471-1180