Nov 4
Chemistry Department Seminar: Tenure-Track Candidate

Emerging Strategies to Decarbonize Chemical Manufacturing with Green Hydrogen
A broad consensus has emerged among technical experts and policymakers that avoiding catastrophic impacts of climate change obligates humans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero within the 21 st century. The path to global decarbonization in industrial sectors like chemical and steel manufacturing can be broken down into two broad categories: electrification, which entails adoption of renewable electricity as the primary energy source for heavy industry; and circularization, which means continuously regenerating raw materials from waste products. Research and development in each of these areas has coalesced around the goal of massively scaling up the use of green hydrogen—derived from renewable electricity and water—as an energy carrier and chemical feedstock. A major challenge facing researchers in this area, however, involves efficiently integrating the production of green hydrogen with its use as a chemical reductant to generate fuels and chemicals.
In this presentation, the candidate will discuss recent and ongoing work in his lab to understand the chemistry of a class of chemical compounds called hydrogen bronze formers. These compounds are stable, mineral-like solids that reversibly absorb hydrogen atoms into their internal crystalline structure. This unique property can be used to build catalysts that mimic biology by breaking complex hydrogenation reactions into individual steps choreographed across multiple specialized active sites. Topics to be covered include electrochemistry and modeling studies aimed at understanding the fundamental properties of tungsten trioxide, a prototypical hydrogen bronze former, along with its use to drive molecular hydrogenations. These results help lay the scientific foundation for entirely new types of chemical reactors that overcome the challenges of integrating the production and use of green hydrogen.
*This seminar counts toward the chemistry major requirement.
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