Research Theme
Nanomaterials Craftsmanship for Catalyst Discovery
My research philosophy is inspired from the timeless potential of “artisanal mindset”, which has been leading to achieve technological, economical and socio-cultural excellence during human’s evolution. It seems counterintuitive in the age of Artificial Intelligence and enormously powerful machines. However, I believe Human’s “Craftsmanship” has it’s own creative edge which should progress hand-in-hand with the technological advancement of the time
Motivation: Advanced catalysts discovery towards the futuristic sustainable chemical synthesis is crippling because of the lack of transferrable mechanistic knowledge from the conventional randomly structured metal particulates-on-support. The field of homogeneous catalysis has flourished on the strong mechanistic foundations of molecular/atomic scale organometallic chemistry. Clearly, similar progress has not occurred in the field of heterogeneous catalysis, despite of the urgent demand for reusability and high performance. My ambition is to provide users with the catalog of choices to go for selecting diverse “catalysts” with well-defined chemical and nanostructural identity, rendering reliable “descriptor data-sets” to intelligently achieve efficient and selective chemical synthesis through new-to-discover mechanistic pathways and applications.
Previous developments
NanoCraft research aims to fill the crucial knowledge gap by leveraging upon the materials chemistry and inventive nanoscale synthesis of well-characterized model nanocatalysts to control the location, atomic arrangements, interfaces and overall microenvironment of the active-sites. These designer nano-architectures take unique advantage of different building materials’ (organic or inorganic) specific features cooperating together within a single nanospace. These well-crafted catalysts provide an asset to control and study chemical reactions in different scenarios where conventional catalysts fail to function.
Nano-localized energy flow on the light-operated ‘Plasmonic-Catalytic’ sites
Metal-surface Microenvironment
Controlling molecular adsorption-desorption behaviors
Catalysis inside/on Living Cells, Yeast, Bacteria and Nanobiohybrids
