CBE Seminar: Joaquin Resasco, UC Santa Barbara

Structure-property relationships at the atomic scale: Understanding next-generation heterogeneous catalysts

Modern society’s reliance on fossil resources as a feedstock for fuels and chemicals has created issues for public health and the health of our environment. Alleviating these problems will require new technologies that decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, and improved processes that reduce the impact of using fossil fuels. Catalysis is key to both of these advances. In this talk, I will describe the framework we have developed for understanding the behavior of this new and exciting class of materials. I will discuss the synthesis and characterization of sinter-resistant catalysts composed of isolated Pt atoms in well-defined locations on oxide nanoparticle supports. Through a combination of in-situ spectroscopy and in-situ atomic resolution microscopy supported by density functional theory calculations we demonstrate that the local coordination of the most stable Pt species depends on the composition of the oxide, and that these changes strongly influence both stability and reactivity.

Biography

Joaquin Resasco completed his B.S in Chemical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, andhis Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Professor Alexis Bell. His doctoral research elucidated the effects of electrolyte ions on the kinetics of electrochemical CO 2 reduction. Joaquin was the recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship and NSF GRFP. He was also selected to the Forbes 30 under 30 list in Science. Joaquin is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara working with Professor Phillip Christopher. His postdoctoral work focuses on developing relationships between the dynamically evolving structure of atomically dispersed catalysts and their reactivity.