We are proud to be part of the newly sponsored CCI Phase I: NSF Center for Integrated Catalysis (CIC)! This center is led by our colleague Prof. Paula Diaconescu of UCLA and joined with Prof. Jeffery Byers and Prof. Dunwei Wang of Boston College, Prof. Loi Do of the University of Houston, and Prof. Alexander Miller of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Guess what we can do when you put organometallic chemistry and material sciences together.

The NSF Center for Integrated Catalysis is supported by the Centers for Chemical Innovation (CCI) program of the NSF Division of Chemistry.  With a 3-year 1.8 M support, we aim to develop the fundamental chemistry needed to prepare synthetic plastics from pools of abundant feedstocks in a single reactor using spatially separated and temporally switchable catalysts. Looking forward to the exciting synergy that we have for chemical catalysis!

The press release at UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry is here.

A website for our center is incoming~ Stay tuned.

Roselyn‘s project on electricity-driven microbial CO2 fixation has been accepted by Nature Catalysis. This work is a collaboration with Prof. Ellen Sletten’s group in our department. Congratulations to Roselyn and all co-authors!

On a side note, Roselyn was selected in the Naval Research Enterprise Intern Program (NREIP), sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). This summer she will spend ten weeks at Naval Research Laboratory at Washington, DC. Enjoy the summer on the east coast. 🙂

The first paper of our group, a perspective article about electrocatalytic dinitrogen reduction at low temperature, is published in the journal Joule. We are grateful to the editor’s kind invitation. And congratulations to Jiao and Jesus! Yeah~~~~~~
Check the article here.

The concept of coupling microbes with inorganic catalysts for artificial photosynthesis is recognized as one of the “Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2017“. This was announced by the World Economic Forum recently in collaboration with Scientific American. Chong’s work published in Science, 2016 is highlighted in the detailed report from Scientific American. 

The “bionic leaf” device that Chong was developing in Prof. Dan Nocera’s lab at Harvard extends the range of molecules that it can handle. Beyond the efficient CO₂-fixing device that was reported last year in Science, now we applied a diazotrophic bacterium to fix N₂ and demonstrated the use of bio-fertilizer generated by electricity. This work is published online in PNAS this week, of which Chong and Kelsey are co-first authors.