Professor Matt Kanan, Stanford University

"Sustainable C–C bond formation: dark reactions for a bright future"

About the Seminar:

Synthetic chemistry could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developing methods that use CO2 as a carbon source and renewable energy as the source of reducing equivalents. In order to be implemented on a significant scale, these methods must be competitive with fossil fuel–based syntheses. To this end, the key chemical challenge is to convert CO2 into multi-carbon products because these targets have higher value, greater energy density, and more applications than C1 compounds. Our strategy is to leverage existing solar energy conversion processes and develop light-independent CO2 conversions that make C–C bonds. This talk will describe our development of new electrocatalysts that enable a two-step reduction of CO2 to ethanol, a C–H carboxylation reaction that can be used to convert inedible biomass into polymer units, and a new approach to CO2 hydrogenation that produces C2 compounds.

About the Speaker:

Matt Kanan joined the faculty at Stanford in 2009. His research addresses challenges in catalysis, energy conversion, and analytical chemistry. Prior to Stanford, Matt carried out postdoctoral research in inorganic chemistry in the lab of Dan Nocera at MIT and completed his Ph.D. studies at the interface of organic chemistry and molecular biology in the lab of David Liu at Harvard. Matt received a B.A. in Chemistry from Rice University in 2000. Matt was most recently the recipient of a Dreyfus Environmental Postdoctoral Mentor Fellowship (2012), a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2014), and named one of the Talented 12 by C&EN (2015).