B25 Ruttan Hall
Seminar abstract:
Biomass derivatives are renewable resources for the sustainable production of renewable fuels and key chemical feedstocks. Converting these derivatives into liquid fuels represents an important pathway for sustainable energy supply. The hydrodeoxygenation of oxygen-containing biomass derivatives is thermodynamically feasible at low temperatures. However, deliberately designing catalytic sites at the atomic scale that are both highly active and selective at low temperatures remains a challenge. It is found that the teamed two sets of single-atom sites supported on an oxide exhibit exceptional activity and selectivity for the hydrodeoxygenation of anisole to benzene at 100-150°C, a temperature range under which supported metal or metal-oxide nanoparticle catalysts are individually inactive. In this seminar, I will present the design principle of a catalyst of dual sets of single-atom sites behind this catalyst system and how it enables low-temperature catalysis for thermodynamically allowed reactions. Additionally, I will discuss how biomass derivatives could be utilized to produce some key chemical feedstocks, the expected technical challenges, and potential solutions.
Dr. Franklin Tao Biography
Dr. Tao earned his PhD from Princeton University under the supervision of Prof. Steven Bernasek. Following this, he conducted postdoctoral research on heterogeneous catalysis in Prof. Gabor Somorjai’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with Prof. Miquel Salmeron’s group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. In August 2010, he began his independent career as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, where he built his catalysis labs and led a research group focusing on catalysis for chemical transformation and renewable energy. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in 2012 and received the Paul Holloway Award of American Vacuum Society in 2013. In February 2014, he received NSF career award to design single-atom catalysis for sustainable chemical transformation. In April-May 2014, he was actively recruited by the University of Kansas (KU) as part of its cluster hiring initiative. KU offered him an early promotion by appointing him as a tenured Miller associate professor in Spring 2014. He accepted this position and then resigned from the University of Notre Dame and relocated his research group to KU in August 2014. At KU, he taught undergraduate courses for undergraduates majoring in chemical engineering.
His research focuses on coupling chemical engineering processes with novel material systems for renewable energy, clean fuel production, and biomass derivative transformation, energy conversion, catalytic materials design, synthetic & renewable fuels, utilization of waste carbon materials, and environmental sustainability.
Over his career, he has published more than 210 peer-reviewed papers, including 4 as the first or corresponding author in Science, 19 in J. Am. Chem. Soc., 8 in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 1 in Nature Energy, 1 in Nature Catalysis, 1 in Nature Chemistry, 1 in Nature Protocol, 3 in Nature Communications, and >20 in ACS Catalysis, with an H-index of 72 and over 18,500 citations. His research group was mainly funded by DOE and NSF. For instance, in the period of 2012 to 2019 he secured about $4.3 million for his research group as a lead PI or PI across twelve DOE and NSF projects, which totaled about $12 million. He was elected as an AAAS Fellow in 2017 and selected as a recipient of Miller Research Award in 2015, the Bellow Scholar Award in 2018, and the University Scholarly Achievement Award - the highest award of KU faculty in 2019.
In addition to his research, he has actively served and contributed to the academic community. He was on the advisory boards or editorial boards of the RSC journals Catalysis Science and Technology and Chemical Society Reviews and Nature Springer journal Scientific Reports. He was appointed as an editor of the Elsevier journal Applied Surface Science. He acted as a guest editor for several themed issues on catalysis and renewable energy published in Chemical Society Reviews, ACS Catalysis, Chemical Communications, and ChemCatChem. In 2018, he served as the program chair of the Division of Catalysis Science and Technology of the American Chemical Society.