Adventures in Chemistry by Prof. Adilov – Summer Research Projects

This summer, the Chemistry Department of SSH hosted over 60 high school students from 20 cities in the country. Experiments were done in the Organic laboratory of the Chemistry Department under the supervision of Professor Salimgerey Adilov. Students were involvded in 5 experiments in the course of 5 days. The first day started with an introduction to the program and a safety demonstration, followed by a glowstick in a beaker experiment, where the light is generated as a result of a chemical reaction. Other experiments include the extraction of caffeine from tea, soap making by saponification, making a silver mirror by redox reaction, and making a bath bomb by using household items. They have also learned about the commercialization of the products they made. All experiments contain some observational changes, or they produce a real product.

Also, 5 undergraduate students (4 students from SDU and one from KazNU) spent one month doing research at Professor Adilov’s lab. They have done the synthesis and characterization of conducting polymers. They learned skills in synthesis, extraction, recrystallization, and column chromatography. As characterization techniques, they did melting point determination, NMR spectrometry for structural analysis, and SEM for surface morphology.

All the students were awarded an official certificate given by the School of Sciences and Humanities.