Welcome

Hi there, I am Alex, also known in the lab as the “Goose” and/or “ADB”.  I have been raised mostly in a small town not so far from Montréal called St-Hyacinthe.  I completed my CÉGEP degree there, after which I worked on construction for about a year.  I then did a degree in biochemistry, including a minor in Chemistry at McGill University, in the lovely city of Montréal.  I was brought to do some volunteering in a photonics lab at École Polytechnique de Montréal, where I was asked to develop a chemical method to uniformly coat optic fibres with a 10-30 nm thick layer of silver(0).  I then got the opportunity to do a chemistry undergraduate research project with Dr. Audrey Moores, McGill University.  I worked there for a year, trying to deposit some palladium(0) nano-islands onto cellulose nanocrystals, synthesising a new hybrid colloidal heterogeneous catalyst. 

As a doctoral student in the Baird group, I am working on eliciting catalytic mechanisms of Ziegler-Natta alkene polymerization reactions, mainly using specialized NMR techniques to assess some intermediate and transient chemical structures. This work has turned up a fascinating array of a-, b- and g-agostic complexes of titanium and zirconium, of types often postulated in the literature but never observed.  See Mike's home page for further info.

Even though I was officially a Montréaler for about 5 years, I never lost my affection for outdoor activities and sports in general: canoeing/kayaking, camping, snowboard, biking, hiking...  I just love to get out of the city once in a while and to keep a good shape.  I also enjoy social drinking times once in a while with friends and, of course, especially with other chemists.

And here I am at Banff last summer

Contact Information

Department of Chemistry
Chernoff Hall, CHE 434
Queen's University
Kingston, ON
K7L 3N6
Tel: (613) 533-6000 ext. 74669
Fax: (613) 533-6669

e-mail: Alexandre.Dunlop-Briere@chem.queensu.ca