Description:

Thursday, September 30, 2021

1:00pm | Tech LR4 and Zoom

The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering is proud to present a seminar with guest speaker Dr. Aleksandra Vojvodic from the University of Pennsylvania.

This talk will be presented over Zoom, and you may attend in-person at Tech LR4 or join over Zoom. Please email Olivia Wise (olivia.wise@northwestern.edu) for the Zoom link.

"C4E – Computational Chemistry of Compounds for Catalysis and Energy"

The race to solve the sustainable energy puzzle is on. First-principles based computational methods, which balance accuracy and computational cost, are at the forefront for solving this puzzle. These computational approaches allow one to describe and understand chemistries of already known materials, and, importantly, they can be used to predict new materials. In this talk, I will first demonstrate how we have been able to computationally predict several new complex catalyst materials including metal oxides, which have been experimentally synthesized, characterized and tested. I then share recent insights on the stability and activity of computationally predicted catalyst systems and conclude with our new efforts to understand the dynamic behavior of these complex materials. Together, this research agenda aims to replace trial-and-error, time-consuming approaches as the main source of development for new materials and chemical routes with a systematic computational materials modeling strategy.

Dr. Aleksandra Vojvodic is the Rosenbluth Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Director of Penn Institute of Computational Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on theoretical and computational-driven materials design, in particular on studies of surfaces and interfaces of complex materials for chemical transformations and energy conversion and storage. 

Recently, she was recognized as the Trottier Fellow in Bio-inspired-solar-energy (2021) and one of the “Women Scientists at the Forefront of Energy Research” (2020). She is the recipient of the Mellichamp Distinguished Lecture, Young Innovator Award in NanoEnergy, the European Federation of Catalysis Societies (EFCATS) Young Researcher Award and of the MIT Technology Review 35 Award which recognized her work and innovative approaches and identified her as “[a] computation whiz that speeds up the search for catalysts that will make green chemistry possible”. She has been selected as a CIFAR Bio-Inspired Solar Energy program fellow and Scialog fellow in Advanced Energy Storage. She has published more than 75 papers in journals including Science, Energy & Environmental Science, Nature Materials, Nature Energy, Nature Communications and JACS.

Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, she was a staff scientist at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where she led a group conducting research on oxide surface reactivity. She was the Swedish Research Council postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and at the Center for Atomic-scale Materials Design at Technical University of Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the Department of Applied Physics at Chalmers University of Technology and her Master of Science in Physics from Lund University in Sweden.