10/16/2023
By Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen
Katharina Domnanich, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (Michigan State University) will give a talk on "Isotope Harvesting at FRIB: Upcoming Opportunities for Scientific Applications."
At the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), exotic secondary beams are created by the fragmentation of a high-power primary beam. However, only a small fraction of the products is selected, while most are intercepted by accelerator components, and the unreacted primary beam stopped in a water-traversed beam dump. The accumulated radionuclides represent an invaluable resource and their collection through a targeted isotope harvesting program will galvanize the advancement of fundamental and applied research opportunities. In the first part of this talk, I will give an overview of the isotope harvesting process, where I will focus on the collection of 62Zn which has application in nuclear medicine for the 62Zn/62Cu PET generator, as well as discuss a proof-of-principle plant uptake and imaging experiment. In addition, a mass separator at FRIB will be established to obtain radioisotopically pure samples for the preparation of targets for other scientific studies. In the second part of this talk, I will give an overview of the first mass mass-separation experiment and future research on radioactive targetry development.
Bio: Katharina Domnanich received her BSc in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland, in 2009. She then completed her MSc in Chemistry at University of Vienna, Austria in 2012 and her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2017. As a graduate student, she worked on the production and purification of Scandium radioisotopes, which are highly interesting for imaging and therapeutic applications in nuclear medicine. In 2018 she joined MSU and FRIB for postgraduate studies where she focused on isotope harvesting and investigation of radiolysis phenomena. She joined the faculty at MSU in the fall of 2022. Her research interests include the production of radionuclides and development of radiogenerator systems for diverse scientific applications, ion exchange, extraction chromatography, solvent extraction, membrane-supported separations, the automation of fluidic systems for radiochemical applications and radiopharmaceutical science.