Matthew Coile
Computational chemical engineer
I am a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University in computational chemical engineering. Most of my Ph.D. has focused on tracking the structure of plastics as we try to convert them into new plastics or other useful chemicals. In my free time, I like to run, hike, and cycle. The picture at the left is from a hike in Colorado near Boulder.
One of my favorite projects was working on a project with another group member, Pavlo, and the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (ADM). The transformation that occurs when cooking where sugars in foods are converted into that delicious golden brown flavor is called the Maillard reaction in food science. However, this is actually a complex network of reactions. ADM wanted to maximize the yield of a particular tasty chemical responsible for that flavor from pure sugar (glucose) so that it could be added to other food products. I did some quantum chemical calculations to estimate the energy barriers for some reactions we hypothesized to be important. We then used transition state theory to predict rate constants from these energy barriers, which were input into a kinetic model to predict product distributions. These matched very nicely with the measurements done by ADM, and we wrote a paper reporting our model and their experiments that allowed us to obtain some of the highest yields of this tasty chemical reported. Here is the paper.
I also quite enjoy collecting interesting gifs. If you find any to add to my collection, please email me at mcoile@u.northwestern.edu
