Sustainable nitrogen activation Faraday Discussion

Hideo Hosono, ForMemRS, is an honorary and institute professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology and a concurrent distinguished fellow and a group lead at National Institute for Materials Science. His major concern is design and exploration of novel electro-active materials such as semiconductors, superconductors and catalysts. He received his Ph.D in applied chemistry from Tokyo Metropolitan University, and became a professor of Tokyo Tech in 1999.  Dr. Hosono proposed a design concept for transparent amorphous oxide semiconductors (TAOSs) with large electron mobility in 1996 and reported c- and a-IGZO (InGaZnOx)-thin film transistors (TFTs) in 2003 -2004.  IGZO-TFTs are now widely used to drive the state of the art displays such as OLED-TVs. In 2008 his group discovered an Iron-based high-Tc superconductor. The paper reporting this discovery was ranked as the most cited paper among all publications in 2008 and chosen as the breakthrough of the year 2008 by the Science Magazine. He is a pioneer of electride materials in which electrons serve as anions and their applications including catalyst for green ammonia synthesis. He has received international awards including the Japan Prize, Von Hippel Prize (MRS), J.C.McGroddy Prize(APS), Jan Raychman Prize(SID), B.T.Matthias Prize and Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Physics.

Professor Doug MacFarlane is a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Monash University’s School of Chemistry. His interests include discovery and application of ionic liquids and other electrolyte materials, most recently for sustainable ammonia production by electrochemical methods. Professor MacFarlane has published more than 800 papers and 30 patents, including a significant suite of patents in electrochemical ammonia generation. In 2021 he cofounded Jupiter Ionics Pty Ltd with co-worker Dr Sasha Simonov to develop and scale up the technology. Professor MacFarlane was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2007. In 2018 he was awarded the Craig Medal – the Academy’s highest honorific for achievement in the field of Chemistry. He was also elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 2009. He was also the winner of the 2018 Victoria Prize for Physical Sciences.

Serena DeBeer is a Professor and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, an honorary faculty member at Ruhr University in Bochum, and the group leader of the PINK Beamline at the Energy Materials In‐Situ Laboratory at Helmholtz Zentrum in Berlin. She received her B.S. in Chemistry at Southwestern University in 1995 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2002. From 2002-2009, she was a staff scientist at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, before moving to her faculty position at Cornell. She is the recipient of a European Research Council Synergy Award (2019), the American Chemical Society Inorganic Chemistry Lectureship Award (2016), the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry Early Career Award (2015), a European Research Council Consolidator Award (2013), a Kavli Fellowship (2012), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2011). Research in the DeBeer group is focused on the development and application of advanced X-ray spectroscopic tools for understanding key mechanisms in biological, homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis.

Marta Hatzell is an Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to starting at Georgia Tech, she was a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Campaign. Currently her research group focuses on exploring the role photochemistry and electrochemistry may play in achieving sustainable catalysis. She is an active member of the American Chemical Society, the Electrochemical Society, ASEEP, AICHE, and ASME. Dr. Hatzell has authored over 60 scientific publications, and serves as a Topic Editor for ACS Energy Letters. Dr. Hatzell has been awarded the NSF Early CAREER award in 2019, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Chemistry in 2020, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2020, the ECS Toyota Young Investigator award in 2021, and the Moore Inventor Fellow in 2021. She also currently serves as a Negative Emissions fellow through the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). 

Patrick Holland was trained at Princeton University (A.B. 1993), University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D. 1997 with Robert Bergman and Richard Andersen), and University of Minnesota (postdoc 1997-200 with William Tolman). His independent research at the University of Rochester initially focused on the properties and reactions of three-coordinate complexes of iron and cobalt. Since then, his research group has broadened its studies to iron-N2 chemistry, reactive metal-ligand multiple bonds, iron-sulfur clusters, engineered metalloproteins, redox-active ligands, solar H2 production, and the mechanisms of organometallic transformations at base metal complexes. In 2013, Prof. Holland moved to Yale University, where he is now Whitehead Professor of Chemistry. His research has been recognized with a number of awards, and election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In N2 reduction, his group has established molecular principles through which iron species are able to weaken and break the N-N bond, and has been a leader in iron chemistry relevant to the iron-molybdenum cofactor of nitrogenase.

John Irvine FRSE, FRSC has made a unique and world-leading contribution to the science of energy materials, especially fuel cell and energy conversion technologies. This research has ranged from detailed fundamental to strategic and applied science and has had major impact across academia, industry and government. Irvine’s science is highly interdisciplinary extending from Chemistry and Materials through physics, bioenergy, geoscience, engineering, economics and policy.

The quality and impact of Irvine’s research has been recognised by a number of national and international awards, including the Royal Society Hughes Medal in 2021,  the Royal Society of Edinburgh Lord Kelvin Medal in 2018, the Schönbeim gold medal from the European Fuel Cell Forum in 2016, the RSC Sustainable Energy Award in 2015, with earlier RSC recognition via Materials Chemistry, Bacon and Beilby awards/medals.

Highlights of Irvine’s activities include discovery of the Emergent nanomaterials phenomenon, establishing the field of oxide fuel electrodes, delivering high performance direct carbon fuel cells and demonstration of significant hydride ion conductivity.  Other important achievements relate to photocatalysis, lithium ion batteries, non-stoichiometric oxides, Structure/ Property/Function, catalysis and electrocatalysis and bioenergy.

Jonas Peters received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Chicago in 1993, where he began research under Professor Gregory Hillhouse in inorganic chemistry. Jonas then spent a year as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Nottingham, UK, working with Professor James J. Turner, FRS. In the fall of 1994, Jonas left Nottingham to begin his doctoral studies under the direction of Professor Christopher C. Cummins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After receiving his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1998, Jonas was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Professor T. Don Tilley. Jonas began as assistant professor in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech in August of 1999, was promoted to associate professor in 2004, and to Professor of Chemistry in 2006. In July of 2007, he relocated to the MIT Department of Chemistry as the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy. Jonas returned to Caltech in January 2010 as Bren Professor of Chemistry and in 2015, he was appointed director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute.
 
Jonas has published some 200 primary research articles and is internationally recognized for his work towards the development of catalysts and photocatalysts with applications in renewable solar fuel technologies, distributed nitrogen fixation for fertilizers and fuels, and chemical transformations fundamental to the discovery of new pharmaceuticals. Jonas and his coworkers are recognized for pioneering research relevant to global carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen cycles, with energy storage applications. As director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute, Jonas is leveraging Caltech’s unique strengths to innovate solutions for a more sustainable planet.

Lance Seefeldt is a Professor and Head of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at Utah State University.  He received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Redlands in California, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Riverside, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Metalloenzyme Studies at the University of Georgia. His research has focused on elucidating aspects of the mechanism of the metalloenzyme nitrogenase.  He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is the recipient of the D. Wynn Thorne Career Research Award from Utah State University.  

Prof. Deniz Üner received her BS and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, in Ankara Turkey. She received her PhD Degree also in Chemical Engineering from Iowa State University, USA. She is currently professor of Chemical Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, and chair of the Micro and Nanotechnology Interdisciplinary Program. Her research is at the nexus of kinetics, thermodynamics and transport phenomena of heterogeneous catalysis. In addition to her academic duties, she consults local and international chemical industry, and serves on the Editorial boards of Catalysis Communications, Catalysis Reviews Science and Engineering and Applied Catalysis B Environmental.