The Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, the new strategic directions of the energy Earthshots proposed by President Biden, and the European Green Deal are all aligned. We are tasked to push a consistent green energy revolution in the next decade to achieve a cost-effective (solar) fuel and chemical synthesis. How do we get there? Decades of progress in the area have laid the foundation for the next significant leap in the field. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for the synthesis of optimized catalytic materials, the development of complex in situ and operando correlative spectroscopic and imaging characterization combined with data science, the advanvements in theoretical methods and models will be the major player in improving cost, efficience, and durability of existing systems. In this symposium, we will bring together the most advanced synthetic, characterization and theory approaches for the energy revolution of the next decade. The main focus will be directed towards hydrogen production, CO2 reduction, nitrogen fixation, and organic electrosynthesis.
- In situ and operando characterization of (photo)electrocatalysts and photocatalysts
- X-ray characterization of light absorbers, electrocatalysts, and photoelectrocatalysts for fuel and chemical production
- Imaging characterization of electrocatalysts and photoelectrocatalysts
- Multimodal and correlative characterization approaches
- Chemical transformations and degradation of (photo)electrocatalysts, light absorbers and membranes for solar fuel production
- Theory of electro and photoelectrocatalytic materials especially connected to in situ and operando characterization
- Data science and machine learning approaches to discovery of novel light absorbers, electrocatalysts, and photoelectrocatalysts for fuel and chemical production
David Prendergast is a Senior Staff Scientist and Facility Director for Theory of Nanostructured Materials at the Molecular Foundry, a Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Center, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in physics from University College Cork in Ireland in 2002 and joined the Foundry as a staff scientist in 2007. In his time at the Foundry, he has developed a remarkably broad multidisciplinary research program, involving X-ray science at the Advanced Light Source, and spanning chemical and materials sciences. David's research combines first-principles electronic structure theory and molecular dynamics simulations to study energy-relevant processes in complex materials systems at the nanoscale, especially at interfaces, often through direct simulation and interpretation of X-ray spectroscopy experiments.
Marco Favaro is the deputy head of the Institute for Solar Fuels at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Germany. After his PhD at the University of Padua (Italy) and Technical University of Munich (Germany), concluded in 2014, he spent two years as a Post-doctoral fellow at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis in Berkeley, USA, in the group of Dr. Junko Yano. He moved to Germany in 2017 to join the HZB. Here, his research activity focuses on understanding chemical composition/electronic-structural properties/performance interplay in photoelectrocatalysts by coupling operando multimodal spectroelectrochemical investigations with synchrotron-based in situ/operando spectroscopies.
Dr. Christopher Kley leads the Helmholtz Young Investigator group "Nanoscale Operando CO2 Photo-Electrocatalysis" at the Helmholtz Center Berlin for Materials and Energy and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. Previously, he was working at the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (Postdoc), Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (PhD), Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (master), and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (study of physics). His research group focuses on deciphering the structural, electrical and catalytic properties of materials under liquid phase reaction conditions by in situ scanning probe microscopy based approaches paired with electrochemical and spectroscopic characterization as well as material synthesis.
Dorota KoziejDr. Tyler Mefford is a Senior Staff Research Scientist in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He has a B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University (2012), a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), and did postdoctoral research in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University (2016-2020). His research is focused on developing advanced electrocatalysts for green chemical production through atomically-controlled synthesis, operando electrochemical scanning probe, X-ray, and electron microscopies, and first principles/microkinetic modeling approaches.
Yuan Ping