UC Irvine

This dissertation introduces the importance of surfactant-based organic chemical reactions and summarizes key development milestones and reaction applications by global laboratories. However, the limitations of current analytical techniques prevent understanding of these multiphasic systems. Though experiments detailed in later chapters, fluorescence microscopy emerged as a technique to examine surfactant-based reactions. A powerful feature of fluorescence microscopy is its ability to obtain subensemble information about chemical reactions and processes that are unobtainable through other analytical techniques. For example, fluorescence microscopy methods, developed by the Blum Laboratory, provide advantages over other methods due to their ability to spatiotemporally resolve effects under synthetic reaction conditions. Herein, a summary of influential studies is included, highlighting the capability of fluorescence microscopy to answer mechanistic questions in complex, multiphasic systems under many different conditions.