Abstract: We will discuss challenges and opportunities in making sustainable fuels and chemicals with energy from the Sun and wind. This talk will focus on recent work towards establishing design rules of the reaction kinetics for water splitting and carbon dioxide reduction, by tuning surface electronic structures and solvation environments at the electrified interface.

Bio: Prof. Yang Shao-Horn is the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She holds joint appointments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics. She has been a faculty member since 2002, and serves on the MITEI Energy Council and as a Co-Director for the MIT Low-Carbon Energy Storage Center.
 
Prof. Shao-Horn’s research is centered on exploiting chemical/materials physics and physical/materials chemistry principles to understand charge transfer at the solid-gas/liquid interface to design and control the kinetics of (electro)chemical reactions and ion mobility in solids and liquids for storing electrons and making chemicals/fuels. Prof. Shao-Horn and coworkers have pioneered the use of electronic structure of oxides to develop universal guiding principles, design catalytic activity and stability across reactions from oxidation of air pollutants, to making of sustainable/solar fuels such as water splitting, CO₂ reduction, and nitrogen reduction.
 
She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and awarded the Faraday Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Prof. Shao-Horn is among the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds and a Highly Cited Researcher.
 

Access the Virtual Seminar:
https://tinyurl.com/GINMIT