A Six-Week Student-Led Project Designed to Provide Insight into Modern Photochemistry Research

An advanced chemistry laboratory project has been developed to introduce final year undergraduate students to organic photocatalyst design using benzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazole (BTZ) photocatalysts, prepared via a single Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling from cheap starting materials, as the example. This project took on a research lab style structure, and over the course of 6 weeks students were tasked to (1) synthesize and study the photophysical properties of three BTZ-based photocatalysts; (2) apply the BTZ photocatalysts to a test photoredox reaction using cheap home-built LEDs, and (3) perform rudimentary computational calculations to rationalize key experimental results.