We are excited to be awarded the 2020 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award! This project is in collaboration with UCLA postdoc alum Prof. Nanette Boyle‘s group at Colorado School of Mines, with the project title “Solar-augmented direct air capture of methane using methanotrophic bacteria”.

A fellow of Scialog: Negative Emissions Science, Chong is grateful for the funding support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

The departmental news report can be found here.

A collaborative team of the Liu group and Prof. Yujie Men’s group at UC Riverside has been awarded a 5-year R01 grant by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Research program. We are excited to apply the interface between inorganic materials and microorganisms for environmental bioremediation!

Now we need more hands.

The recent influx of research grants supporting the next 5 years enables the Liu lab to host additional postdoctoral researchers in the Liu group. The candidates are expected to have expertise in either of the two areas: (1) inorganic materials synthesis and electrochemical catalysis; (2) bio-based materials and microbiology.

Please contact Chong for more information: chongliu@chem.ucla.edu

2020 is not a bad year for the Liu Group so far, as the Liu Group has been awarded a few grants from external funding agencies:

1. As we reported earlier, the Liu Group is part of the NSF CCI Phase I: Center for Integrated Catalysis, a multi-group center developing spatially separated and temporally switchable catalysts.
2. The Liu Group is awarded by the NSF Division of Chemistry with a 3-year standard grant: CAS: Ambient Electrochemical Activation of Light Alkanes with Early Transition Metal-Oxo Species.
3. The Liu Group is awarded by the NSF Division of Chemistry with a 2-year EAGER grant: EAGER: Nanostructure-enabled solution catalysis with concentration gradients.
4. The Liu Group forges an industrial sponsorship with BASF California Research Alliance (CARA).
5. Last but not least, the Liu Group receives the NIH NIGMS R35 Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA), titled as “Spatiotemporal control of concentration gradients with electrochemistry in extracellular space”. This is a 5-year project about our foray into the interface between electrochemistry and microbiology!

We are grateful for all the research support! Check out our exciting research progresses in the years to come!

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.