Silicon Valley September Seminar

Online

Date: Thursday, September 19
Time: 5:30 – 7:00 pm

If you would like to attend, register in advance for this webinar.

After the webinar, you are invited to talk to the speaker and mingle with other alumni in a post-webinar social via a Zoom meeting. If you would like one of our alumni or professors to share with us his/her work/interests during a future seminar, please let me know.

We look forward to seeing you.

Peter Tong

Avoiding Hydrogen: Moving Protons and Electrons to Where We Want Them Instead
By Jonas Peters

Electrons, and the protons with which they associate to make hydrogen atoms, are the fuel currency of life. They are the basis by which biology stores up food (photosynthesis), provides the world with high density energy (oil), and generates key ingredients we need to make biomolecules like protein and DNA (fertilizer). Simply put, hydrogen atoms decorate the key molecular building blocks of our world.

Hydrogen gas (H₂) is readily made by combining protons and electrons, in fact so easily that it’s hard to avoid. While this is great news if hydrogen is what you want (such as in water electrolysis for the hydrogen economy), avoiding hydrogen presents a daunting challenge if you want other chemical products instead. Indeed, among the most fascinating challenges in catalysis today is to control proton/electron currency in a manner that avoids, or at least heavily mitigates, the production of hydrogen. Equally challenging is to efficiently direct hydrogen towards other substrates (nitrogen, carbon dioxide, organic molecules) to make the hydrogen-rich molecules (ammonia, ethylene, alkanes) needed to feed and fuel the planet.

As our society aspires to shift to an increasingly renewably sourced energy supply, this challenge in catalytic selectivity becomes an exciting opportunity. If we can devise ways to efficiently manage hydrogen atoms, for example by shifting them from water (H₂O) to nitrogen or carbon dioxide, we may be able to feed and fuel the planet more sustainably.

To build the fundamental science needed to address such challenges, our lab at Caltech, inspired by Nature, is devising new catalytic approaches for managing proton and electron currency. My presentation will walk you through our master plan, from the bottom up.

Jonas C. Peters is Bren Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the Caltech since 2015. His research focuses on new concepts for catalysis (including electro- and photocatalysis) with applications in renewable solar fuel technologies, distributed nitrogen fixation for fertilizers and fuels, and chemical transformations fundamental to the synthesis of organic molecules. Peters earned his BSc degree at the University of Chicago (’93), spent a year as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Nottingham (’94), did his PhD at MIT (’98), and a postdoc as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley (’99). He has been on the faculty at Caltech since 1999, including a brief period on the faculty at MIT (2007-2010).

‍Our Alumni Volunteers‍

The following alumni work together to serve you:
Avni Gandhi, Dave Adler, Jane Frommer, Mike Klein, Xinh Huynh, and Peter Tong.