The synthesis of molecular fuels and chemical feedstocks from renewable energy sources has enormous potential as a scalable approach for reducing our dependence on fossil fuel resources. Electrification of the chemical processes holds the promise to be one of the solutions. This symposium invites contributions on the latest progress in the field of electrocatalysis, reporting state of the art catalyst, techniques and advances in our understanding of their function and how concepts are used to design new catalysts. The sessions will span from molecular catalysts to materials, including biohybrid systems and systems-level challenges required to develop viable technologies. Water oxidation, water reduction, CO2 reduction and dinitrogen reduction will be covered together with the transformation of small organic molecules.
- Fundamental strategies to design new electrocatalysis
- Mechanistic understanding
- In situ and Operando analyses
- Molecular, inorganic, reticular and hybrid catalytic systems
Prof. Julio Lloret-Fillol graduated in Chemistry from the Universidad de Valencia in 2001 where he also obtained his PhD in 2006, working under the supervision of Prof. P. Lahuerta and Prof. J. Pérez-Prieto. After his PhD he moved to the University of Heidelberg to the group of Prof. L. H. Gade as a postdoctoral MEyC fellow and postdoctoral Marie Curie fellow. Since 2010 he has been working as an independent research leader at Universitat de Girona (Ramón y Cajal program). In 2014 he obtained a position as Young Research Group Leader at the Institut de Química Computational i Catàlisi (UdG). In November 2014 he move to the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) as a junior group leader and in 2020 promoted to his actual position of Senior group leader.
James Durrant is Professor of Photochemistry in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London and Ser Cymru Solar Professor, University of Swansea. His research addresses the photochemistry of new materials for solar energy conversion targeting both solar cells (photovoltaics) and solar to fuel (i.e.: artificial photosynthesis. It is based around employing transient optical and optoelectronic techniques to address materials function, and thereby elucidate design principles which enable technological development. His group is currently addressing the development and functional characterisation of organic and perovskite solar cells and photoelectrodes for solar fuel generation. More widely, he leads Imperial's Centre for Processable Electronics, founded the UK�s Solar Fuels Network and led the Welsh government funded S�r Cymru Solar initiative. He has published over 500 research papers and 5 patents, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Vincent Artero was born in 1973. He is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm; D/S 93) and of the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6). He received the Ph.D. degree in 2000 under the supervision of Prof. A. Proust. His doctoral work dealt with organometallic derivatives of polyoxometalates. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle) with Prof. U. Kölle, he joined in 2001 the group of Prof. M. Fontecave in Grenoble with a junior scientist position in the Life Science Division of CEA. Since 2016, he is Research Director at CEA and leads the SolHyCat group. His current research interests are in bio-inspired chemistry including catalysis related to hydrogen energy and artificial photosynthesis.
Vincent Artero received the "Grand Prix Mergier-Bourdeix de l'Académie des Sciences" in 2011 and has been granted with a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC, photocatH2ode project 2012-2017). He's a member of the Young academy of Europe (YAE). He currently acts as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the ARCANE Excellence Laboratory Network (LABEX) for bio-driven chemistry in Grenoble and as co-head of the French network (CNRS-Groupement de recherche) on Solar Fuels. Since 2016, Vincent Artero is associate editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal "Sustainable Energy and Fuels". From January 2018 onward, he actsas associate editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry flagship journal "Chemical Science"
Boettcher is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Oregon. His research is at the intersection of materials science and electrochemistry, with a focus on fundamental aspects of energy conversion and storage. He has been named a DuPont Young Professor, a Cottrell Scholar, a Sloan Fellow, and a Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. He was included as an ISI highly cited researcher (top 0.1% over past decade) over the past two years. In 2019, he founded the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry and in 2020 launched the nation’s first targeted graduate program in electrochemical technology.
Kara BrenMarc T.M. Koper is Professor of Surface Chemistry and Catalysis at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He received his PhD degree (1994) from Utrecht University (The Netherlands) in the field of electrochemistry. He was an EU Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ulm (Germany) and a Fellow of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) at Eindhoven University of Technology, before moving to Leiden University in 2005. His main research interests are in fundamental aspects of electrocatalysis, proton-coupled electron transfer, theoretical electrochemistry, and electrochemical surface science.
Prof. Magalí Lingenfelder is a PI with an excellent track record and a passion for atomically controlled interfaces. Her work contributes to the design of new materials by elucidating chemical processes by Scanning Probe Microscopies and Surface Sensitive Spectroscopies, including dynamic (bio) molecular recognition processes at the liquid/solid interface.
She created and led for over 10 years the Max Planck-EPFL laboratory for Molecular Nanoscience at EPFL campus in Switzerland, and is currently leading the Helvetia Institute for Science and Innovation.
She studied physical and biological chemistry at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. In 2003, she finished her MSc thesis at the Max Planck Institute for the Solid State Research (MPI-FKF in Stuttgart, Germany) with seminal contributions to the field of metal-organic coordination networks on solid surfaces. She continued with her doctoral studies in Physics, and received the Otto Hahn medal of the Max Planck Society in 2008 for the microscopic understanding of the chiral recognition process with submolecular resolution. In her quest to study molecular recognition going from 2D to 3D complex systems, she made postdoctoral stays at the Institute of Materials Sciences in Barcelona, and at the Molecular Foundry of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the US.
She is a committed mentor who directed 4 MSc theses, 5 PhD theses, and 5 postdocs. She advocates for problem-oriented interdisciplinary research, by pioneering the emerging field of BioNanoarchitectonics. She led 5 international research consortiums, delivered over 50 invited presentations, and organized 9 conferences and 4 doctoral schools. She and her team had received multiple awards and international recognitions for their creative and rigurous work on molecular recognition, chirality and operando studies at catalytic interfaces. In 2018, the Royal Society of Chemistry included her work in the first collection “Celebrating Excellence in Research: 100 Women of Chemistry”.
Professor Erwin Reisner received his education and professional training at the University of Vienna (PhD in 2005), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (postdoc from 2005-2007) and the University of Oxford (postdoc from 2008-2009). He joined the University of Cambridge as a University Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry in 2010, became a Fellow of St. John’s College in 2011, was appointed to Reader in 2015 and to his current position of Professor of Energy and Sustainability in 2017. He started his independent research programme on artificial photosynthesis (solar fuels) with the support of an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship (2009-2015), which also received substantial early support by the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry (2012-2019). In 2016, he received a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to develop the field of semi-artificial photosynthesis (biohybrid systems for solar fuel synthesis) and has recently been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant (now funded by the UKRI underwrite scheme) on semi-biological domino catalysis for solar chemical production. He is the academic lead (PI) of the Cambridge Circular Plastics Centre (CirPlas; since 2019), where his team develops solar-powered valorisation technologies for the conversion of solid waste streams (biomass and plastics) to fuels and chemicals. He has acted as the academic lead of the UK Solar Fuels Network, which coordinates the national activities in artificial photosynthesis (2017-2021) and is currently a co-director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Integrated Functional Nano (nanoCDT) in Cambridge as well as a member of the European research consortia ‘Sofia’ and ‘solar2chem'.
Marc Robert was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Cachan, France) and gained his Ph.D. in 1995 from Paris Diderot University under the guidance of Claude Andrieux and Jean-Michel Savéant. After one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University (USA), working alongside Matt Platz, he joined the faculty at Paris Diderot University as Associate Professor. He was promoted to full Professor in 2004, and distinguished Professor in 2019 at Université de Paris. He became a junior Fellow of the University Institute of France (IUF) in 2007 and a senior Fellow in 2017. He was a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) research Fellow (2015). Among various distinctions, Marc Robert received the first International Prize Essential Molecules Challenge from Air Liquide (2016) and the Chemistry and Energy Research Prize from the French Chemical Society (2019). His interests include electrochemical, photochemical, and theoretical approaches of electron transfer reactions and reactivity in chemistry, as well as catalytic activation of small molecules, mainly CO2 and N2.
Prof. Beatriz Roldán Cuenya is currently Director of the Interface Science Department at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin (Germany). She is an Honorary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, at the Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Ruhr-University Bochum, all in Germany. Also, she serves as a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Central Florida (USA).
Prof. Roldán Cuenya began her academic career by completing her M.S./B.S. in Physics with a minor in Materials Science at the University of Oviedo, Spain in 1998. Afterwards she moved to Germany and obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Physics of the University of Duisburg-Essen with summa cum laude in 2001. Subsequently, she carried out her postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA) until 2003.
In 2004, she joined the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida (UCF) as Assistant Professor where she moved through the ranks to become a full professor in 2012. In 2013 Prof. Roldan Cuenya, moved to Germany to become Chair Professor of Solid State Physics in the Department of Physics at Ruhr-University Bochum until 2017.
During her academic career, Prof. Roldan Cuenya received an Early CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation (2005) and the international Peter Mark Memorial award from the American Vacuum Society (2009). In 2016 she became Fellow of the Max Planck Society in Germany and also received the prestigious Consolidator Award from the European Research Council. In 2020, she became a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe). She received the AVS Fellow Award (2021), the International Society of Electrochemistry-Elsevier Prize for Experimental Electrochemistry (2021), the 2022 Paul H. Emmet Award of the North American Catalysis Society, and the Röntgen Medal of the City of Remscheid (2022).
Prof. Dr. Beatriz Roldan Cuenya is the author of 245 peer-reviewed publications, 6 book chapters and 6 patents. She has been supervising 74 postdoctoral fellows and 36 PhD students. She has given 245 invited talks, with 13 plenary talks and 33 keynote lectures since 2017. Her H-factor is 74 (Google Scholar) and her work has received over 21,500 citations.
She presently serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Catalysis and Chemical Reviews. In addition, she also contributes to a number of advisory committees, including the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (USA), the Advanced Research Center Chemical Building Blocks Consortium (Utrecht, the Netherlands), the Spanish Synchrotron Facility ALBA (Barcelona, Spain), the German Synchrotron DESY (Hamburg, Germany), the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for the strategic development of BESSY II (Berlin, Germany), the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ in Tarragona, Spain), the UK Catalysis Hub and the Ertl Center for Electrochemistry & Catalysis (South Korea).
Prof. Roldan Cuenya’s research program explores physical and chemical properties of nanostructures, with emphasis on advancements in nanocatalysis based on operando microscopic and spectroscopic characterization.