Dr. Theodore Alivio

Dr. Alivio has a strong interest in chemical education and prior to coming to Nicholls State University, he worked as part of a collaborative team to develop an experiment for modifying the wettability of various solid substrates as part of the physical chemistry curriculum at Texas A&M University. Currently, he is working on identifying and investigating success predictors for general chemistry students enrolled in primarily-undergraduate institutions like Nicholls. This builds on a previous research he has done at an R1 institution (Alivio, T.E.G., et al. J. Sci. Educ. Technol. 2020, article ahead of print, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-020-09851-7).

His other research interests are focused on understanding the interfacial chemistry of engineered and natural nanomaterials. He developed a novel ex situ diffusive doping method for incorporating B atoms into vanadium(IV) oxide nanowires (Alivio, T.E.G., et al., Chem. Mater. 2017, 29, 5401–5412 and Sellers et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 15513–15526 and Yano, A. et al, 2020, J. Phys. Chem. C. 2020, 124, 21223-21231. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.0c04952), thereby modifying the phase diagram of VO2 and tuning its metal—insulator transition temperature. He also studied and elucidated the mechanism of Ag—Au bimetallic alloy nanoparticles in natural aquatic media (Alivio, T.E.G., et al., Environ. Sci. Technol. 2018, 52, 7269–7278) geared towards understanding their fate and transport in natural aquatic media.