Scientific Research

Our group aspires to design and develop “greener” alternatives for existing chemical processes, alternatives that produce less waste, use benign solvents, and are more energy efficient. These processes, old and new, are often enabled by a substance that we call 'catalysts', so our task is to discover and develop, based on understanding rather than by chance, highly selective catalysts that suppress undesirable products and improve the overall energy- and atom-efficiency. More specifically, we work together to discover and understand catalytic processes that convert renewable feed stocks (e.g., biomass) and recalcitrant, heavy oil, into liquid energy carriers and chemicals. Every time we do so, we remind ourselves that our novel solutions must be simple and involve a minimum number of operations, because we lose energy and resources with every additional step. 

Projects in our group address targeted sets of chemistry, which we are motivated to study by the need to produce fuels and chemicals for our society in the most efficient and environmentally responsible way possible. We draw chemical connections between systematic changes in the physical properties of catalysts and their chemical reactivity by synthesizing and studying highly uniform materials. Each project in our group aligns with one or several of the following research themes: (1) zeolite catalyzed chemical transformations at solid-liquid and solid-gas interfaces; (2) encaged active sites in porous materials for catalytic transformations; (3) C-C and C-O construction and deconstruction chemistries.