Tuesday, February 8, 2021 featured:
Professor María Escudero-Escribano from University of Copenhagen
"Tailored interfaces for oxygen and carbon dioxide electrocatalysis"
Abstract:
Tailoring the structure of the electrochemical interface at the atomic and molecular levels is key to design new electrocatalysts for renewable energy conversion. This talk will focus on our recent work on novel catalyst materials and engineered interfaces to understand and tune the electrocatalytic activity and selectivity. In particular, I will discuss structure sensitivity and electrolyte effects for oxygen and carbon dioxide electrocatalysis. First, I will present our investigations on tailored electrocatalyst structures for oxygen reduction and evolution for applications in fuel cells and water electrolyzers, respectively. In particular, we have developed high surface area nanostructured Ir-based catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) with a unique morphology and excellent mass activity. In addition, our studies show the important role electrolyte anions play on Ir nanoparticles for OER. The last part of the talk will focus on well-defined Cu-based surfaces for electrochemical CO2 and CO reduction. In our group, we have investigated the interfacial properties of Cu single-crystalline electrodes in contact with different electrolytes. We have studied the effect of pH, specific anion adsorption and potential dependence for CO reduction. Our work shows how combining model studies with real systems is essential to tune the structure-function relations and design new materials with enhanced electrocatalytic properties.
Bio:
María Escudero Escribano is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. She obtained her PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2011. She carried out her postdoctoral research at the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark and the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, before moving to the University of Copenhagen in 2017. María is a Villum Young Investigator and co-PI of the Center for High Entropy Alloy Catalysis. Her group investigates tailored electrochemical interfaces and catalyst materials for renewable energy conversion and electrosynthesis of green fuels and valuable chemicals. Her work has resulted in 58 scientific publications and she is a co-inventor of three patents. María has received numerous awards at national and international levels in recognition of her groundbreaking research, including the European Young Chemist Award 2016 (Gold Medal), the Princess of Girona Scientific Research Award 2018, the Electrochemical Society Energy Technology Division Young Investigator Award 2018, the Clara Immerwahr Award 2019 and the Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship 2021.
Host: Prof. Sen Zhang, University of Virginia