- Home
- Education
- Behind the Science
- The Scientists
- Tendai Gadzikwa
Tendai Gadzikwa
Professional Title:
Assistant Professor
University Department, Lab:
Supramolecular Chemistry & Organometallic Catalysis (SupraCat) Lab in the Department of Chemistry at Kansas State University
Brief Bio:
I do not have a typical origin of a scientist story. As a child, I was not the precocious dismantler of electronics, the explorer of the outdoors, nor was I, as expected of a young chemist, blowing things up in the kitchen. Instead, I preferred to stay inside, in spite of Zimbabwe’s year-round beautiful weather, and read whatever I could get my hands on. In school, I enjoyed a wide range of subjects, but wasn’t particularly drawn to one over the others. So when I was 18, I moved to the US because I wanted a liberal arts education, which would allow me to explore as many subjects as I could. What finally led me down my current career path was a summer spent doing undergraduate research in a synthetic chemistry lab. There was something truly awe-inspiring about drawing a molecule on paper, designing a step-by-step process to make it, going into the lab to test that process, then finally getting data that confirmed you had made your molecule. And even more mind-blowing, was the first moment I realized that I had just made molecules that had potentially never existed on this planet until I synthesized them!
Since then I have been hooked, and I have moved around the world - Northwestern University (PhD), University of Amsterdam (postdoc), University of Zimbabwe (faculty), University of Alberta (visiting scholar) - making cool new molecules and materials for a variety of purposes. Since 2016, I have been at K-State leading a lab that synthesizes molecular structures that attempt to emulate the design elements and properties of biological stuctures.
Current Research Question:
Can we use synthetic chemistry to make molecular structures that mimic enzymes?
Background on Research:
Enzymes are nature’s catalysts. They make biological reactions proceed more efficiently, and humans have been using them to perform a variety of chemical reactions (e.g. bread & beer making) for thousands of years. For several decades now, chemists have been trying to mimic some of the strategies of enzymes, and apply them to non-biological reactions. Artificial catalysts that are as efficient as enzymes would make industrial processes more time and energy efficient, and would produce less waste.
Overview of Methods Used:
Enzymes are extremely large molecules (thousands of atoms) that form intricate, 3-dimensional structures. Trying to make similar structures atom-by-atom is impossibly difficult, so we use Supramolecular Chemistry. This can be considered “molecular architecture”: using various chemical design principles, we use molecules (a group of atoms already connected together) as building blocks to construct much larger supramoleules molecule-by-molecule.