12/8/15 Congratulations to Dilini for passing her Preliminary Oral Exam! Now she is a candidate for the PhD, which only means she has a lot of work ahead! ;) Keep up the great work Dilini!

 

11/20/15 Welcome to Pranjali Naik as a new graduate student in the group. We are looking forward to see her gaining activation energy towards conversion into a PhD.

 

10/12/15 Congratulations to Umesh, Nick and Kapil for our latest paper in ACS Catalysis! We observed that a hybrid catalyst containing copper and iron oxides on MSNs has a significantly higher activity for the partial hydrodeoxygenation of fatty acids compared to single metal oxide catalysts. This allows running the reaction at much lower temperatues and pressures than the standard process (180 oC and 30 bar H2 compared to 300 oC and 250 bar H2). Our investigation of the mechanism points to in situ formation of metallic copper that binds and activates hydrogen, the hydrogen then spills over to the iron oxide where bound fatty acids are reduced. This process is very selective for fatty alcohols, which are important industrial commodity chemicals (a $ 2 billion market), and avoids the use of chromium promoter, which is an environmental concern related to the current process. This new catalyst is a wonderful addition to our toolkit of methods for converting biorenewable feedstocks into fuels and commodity chemicals! We are inevitably heading green! Awesome job guys!

 

 

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9/30/15 Farewell to Naftali. He is starting a career in industry, all the best for a succesful future!

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9/21/15 Welcome on board to Justin Farrell, senior in Physics and Astronomy. He will be working with Sebastián developing new nanoparticle-based inks for 3D printing applications.

 

5/27/15 Welcome to our new DOE summer SULI interns: Vanna Blasczak from Stetson University, Jacinta Misra from ISU, and Ishankumar Soni from Kutztown University, Pennsylvania. They are all ready to work with Sebastián, Dilini and Nick, respectively, and we are all excited to be part of their training. Looking forward for a great Summer!

 

5/15/15 Naftali presented our research on the structural investigation of functional ordered mesoporous carbons at the 2nd Midwest Postdoctoral Symposium.

 

4/08/15 Congratulations to Nick for being awarded the Noble Hines Fellowship based on his outstanding performance in research, not only his own, but enabling and supporting the research of fellow students! All the best!

 

3/16/15 Welcome to Prof. Ma Zhong-Hua who is visiting the group from the Department of Chemistry, College of Science at the Huazhong Agriculture University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, P. R. China. He will join us for one year to work on development of advanced materials for agricultural applications.

 

3/03/15 Congratulations to Nick for our latest paper in ACS Catalysis! He demonstrated how a high surface mesoporous ceria material can be an active support for the Pd catalyzed hydrogenation of phenol at room temperature under atmospheric pressure. The mechanism of the reaction was thoroughly investigated and the remarkable activity and selectivity for cyclohexanone (precursor for Nylon monomer) was discovered to depend significantly on the dissociative adsorption of the substrate on the redox active support. Way to go Nick!