Our lab's vision is to bridge the materials complexity gap between fundamental and applied industrial catalyst design.
Our lab's mission is to leverage colloidal principles (of synthesis, assembly, and/or templating) to design, from the bottom-up, modular catalyst platforms whereby the active-site(s) and their local environments can be independently manipulated. By doing so, we elucidate clear structure-property relationships that would otherwise be obscured using conventional catalyst preparation techniques. We then translate these new insights to design more active, selective, and stable catalytic materials for a sustainable future.
Research
Colloidal chemistry • Nanoscience • Catalyst Design • Heterogeneous Catalysis • Materials Chemistry
Well-defined nanoparticles
We synthesize well-defined colloidal nanoparticles to tailor the composition, local abundance, and geometric arrangement of surface active site motifs. Our goal is to optimize atomic efficiency of precious metals while steering catalytic selectivity towards our desired high-value products.
Nanoparticle-support interactions
We design partially embedded and porous hierarchical catalytic architectures to control nanoparticle-support interfacial contact. Our goal is to cooperatively integrate spatially separated functionalities to unlock newfound chemistries while enhancing catalytic stability under harsh evaluation conditions.
Colloidally templated catalysts
We employ colloidal templating and assembly strategies to tune nanoparticle-nanoparticle ensemble interactions and their immediate reaction environment. Our goal is to alter local transport and catalytic outcomes for multi-step reaction cascades and branched reaction networks.