Rebecca A. Peebles

Education & Training

B.A., Oberlin College, 1996
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2000
EIU, 2001 

Frequently Taught Courses

CHM 1040 - The World of Chemistry
CHM 1310 - General Chemistry I
CHM 1315 - General Chemistry Laboratory I
CHM 1390 - Honors General Chemistry I
CHM 1395 - Honors General Chemistry I Laboratory
CHM 1410 - General Chemistry II
CHM 1415 - General Chemistry II Lab
CHM 3910 - Chemical Thermodynamics & Kinetics
CHM 3915 - Physical Chemistry Laboratory
CHM 3920 - Quantum Chemistry
CHM 5300 - Molecular Spectroscopy (graduate course)

Research & Creative Interests

I am interested in several different types of spectroscopy. My doctoral research focused on microwave spectroscopy of weakly bound dimers and trimers.  More recently, I have been able to pursue microwave studies at EIU in collaboration with Dr. Sean Peebles's group.  Our chirped-pulse Fourier-transform microwave spectrometer has been operational since June 2009 and has been used by undergraduate and master's students for a variety of studies of molecules and weakly bound dimers.  

My main interest is in building a better understanding of weak non-covalent interactions between molecules (hydrogen bonding, dispersion forces, etc.).  These interactions play a significant role in many real-world situations.  For example, weak hydrogen bonding is important in the mechanism by which some anesthetics work, and weak interactions between a solute molecule and solvent molecules determine the ability of the solute to dissolve.  Our current focus is on studying small clusters of fluorinated molecules with carbon dioxide.  These systems can act as models for building an understanding of the properties of supercritical CO2, which is an increasingly important, environmentally friendly, green solvent for a wide range of industrial applications.  Our studies use a combination of experimental data from our (and collaborators') labs, computational chemistry data collected using Gaussian 09 and other software at EIU, and new spectroscopic analysis techniques that we are implementing at EIU using software such as Mathcad and Python.  This work is supported by external funding from the National Science Foundation.

Other research interests of mine involve using vibrational spectroscopy to investigate small molecules with environmental significance.  Most of our vibrational work utilizes the far-IR beamline at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron facility in Saskatoon, Canada.  This facility provides an infrared spectrometer with resolution of better than 0.001 cm-1, which is about 100 times the resolution of the instruments at EIU, and the synchrotron light source is much brighter than the sources in traditional IR spectrometers so that weak spectra can be observed more efficiently.  Data is collected in Saskatoon (often with students) and analyzed at EIU.  Recent work has been on spectra of several different vibrational modes of 1,1-dichloroethylene (H2C=CF2), which is a polymer precursor that is a pollutant when it gets into water sources.  These studies also utilize a combination of experimental and computational techniques.