Dr. Dan DuBois Joins PNNL's IIC
Dr. Dan DuBois has recently joined our staff at PNNL. Dan comes to us from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory where he was principal scientist and leader of the Synthesis and Catalysis Team. His research interests include the catalytic interconversion of fuels and electricity, synthetic organometallic and inorganic chemistry, and thermodynamic studies relevant to catalysis. His research team has developed new classes of electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction, hydrogen oxidation, and hydrogen production. New electrochemical methods for CO2 separation and recovery have also been developed. His team was also the first to accurately measure the thermodynamic ability of transition-metal hydrides to transfer their hydride ligand, an important fundamental property of these compounds with broad implications in catalysis.
Structure and performance of catalysts confined to the gas/solution/metal-oxide interface.
Dan and his collaborators at the University of Colorado have recently published exciting new results demonstrating that synthetic, air-stable catalysts based on inexpensive first-row transition metals such as Ni can approach the activities of hydrogenase enzymes. Such catalysts could ultimately find applications in water splitting schemes for hydrogen production and as hydrogen oxidation catalysts in fuel cells. Dan is anxious to pursue the further development of these catalysts by confining them to the gas/solution/metal-oxide interface. The structure of one of these new catalysts is shown below adjacent to a figure showing cyclic voltammograms that are used to measure catalyst performance.
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