CBE Seminar: Nick Brunelli, The Ohio State University

Description

Nicholas Brunelli 

HC Slip Slider Professorship, Chemical & Biomolecular Eng

The Ohio State University

Research Bio

Our research program focuses on the design, synthesis, spectroscopic interrogation, and reaction testing of novel catalytic materials. We bring a broad background of organic and inorganic synthesis techniques to investigate fundamental aspects of catalytic materials with the goal of increasing catalytic selectivity and activity. A major focus of our work is creating uniform catalytic sites. For heterogeneous catalytic materials, typical synthetic methods produce a distribution of catalytic sites, making identification of the highly active and selective species difficult. Homogeneous catalysis overcomes this through making well-defined small molecule catalysts through organic synthesis techniques. Our approach utilizes organic synthesis techniques to generate the highly organized catalytic active sites. Through spectroscopie interrogation and catalytic testing, we seek to identify highly selective and active structures. Iterative design, synthesis and testing enables our work to advance fundamental understanding of catalytic material design.