MSE Seminar: Brad Chmelka (UCSB)

Description

New mesostructured materials for sustainable energy applications

Advances in synthesis and characterization capabilities enable the atomic-scale features of heterogeneousmaterials to be measured, understood, and correlated with their macroscopic properties. This includes inorganic-organic hybrid materials, whose dissimilar components impart novel combinations of self-assembly, transport, reactivity, or stability properties. Two examples are mesoporous nitrogen-carbon electrocatalysts and mesostructured silica-surfactant materials with functionally-active membrane protein guests, whose properties have been challenging to understand and control. In these systems, the interface compositions, structures, dynamics, and interactions of the component species have important influences on their respective macroscale electrochemical or photo-chemical properties. X-ray scattering, electron microscopy, UV-visible spectroscopy, and especially solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy yield detailed insights on mesoscale and local order and disorder in the materials, as well as on the distributions of key functional species. Recent results will be presented on mesoporous nitrogen-carbon electrocatalysts for fuel cells and batteries and semipermeable mesostructured silica-surfactant films containing the transmembrane protein proteorhodopsin, a light-activated H+ ion pump, for solar-to-electrochemical conversion. The analyses provide new nanoscale understanding of composition-structure-function relationships, which establish criteria for the design of materials with novel or improved properties for sustainable energy applications.
 

Bio: Bradley Chmelka is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research seeks to understand and improve the macroscopic properties of heterogeneous materials through analyses of their atomic-level compositions, structures, and dynamics. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently conducted post-doctoral research in physical chemistry at UC Berkeley with Alexander Pines and in polymer physics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany with Hans Wolfgang Spiess.

Chmelka has been on the faculty at UCSB since 1992, has authored more than 200 publications, and has 10 issued patents. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2015) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering (2017). His research has been recognized by the Braskem Award from the Materials Engineering and Sciences and Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Award. He has served on several industrial advisory boards and holds an honorary doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He has been an invited professor at universities in Sweden, France, Switzerland, Israel, and Spain. Since 2015, he has served as Co-Director of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, a large U.S. government-supported research center involving research groups at UCSB, MIT, and Caltech that is focused on the development of biology for principally non-medical applications. For the university, he has served as Chair of UCSB’s Committee on Academic Personnel, as Chair of UCSB’s Committee on Committees, and as Associate Dean of Academic Personnel for UCSB’s College of Engineering.