Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Eric Schelter, University of Pennsylvania
Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Eric Schelter, University of Pennsylvania (Host: Matias Horst)
About the Talk
“Fundamental Principles in Coordination Chemistry Applied to Metal Ion Separations for Outcomes in Sustainability”
Metals such as gold, palladium, tellurium, lithium, and the rare earths are now pervasive in technology and used regularly in our daily lives. But where do they come from, and how do we get them into pure forms for use in technology? In many cases, mining and purification practices for ‘critical’ metals and extremely harmful for people and the environment. It is therefore attractive to try and reclaim such metals from spent devices. However, in many cases, chemistry and engineering to recycle specific critical metals is lacking, compared to the cost of obtaining them from primary sources. In this talk, efforts to develop fundamental new separations chemistry for recycling critical metals will be presented. Among these, efficient, inter-f-element separations, such as within the rare earths, remain a perennial challenge. We have been interested in triggering element-specific changes, for example through highly specific structural differences, to achieve efficient separations through new thermodynamic modes. And in an orthogonal approach, to express differences in metal complexes through variable rates of some chemical change – a separations chemistry through kinetics. Both methods allow direct connection of coordination chemistry to macroscopic properties for separations. These connections have enabled new modes in solid-liquid extraction to complement solvent extraction for specialized applications. For this talk, our latest results on chelating and redox active ligand frameworks and their applications in thermodynamic and kinetic separations of elements will be presented.
About the Speaker
Eric J. Schelter is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania where he is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Separations of Metals, an NSF Center for Chemical Innovation. As an undergraduate, Eric attended Michigan Tech where he worked with Prof. Rudy Luck to prepare low-valent rhenium compounds. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2004 from Texas A&M University under the direction of Prof. Kim R. Dunbar where he prepared and characterized high-spin metal–cyanide clusters. Subsequently, he conducted postdoctoral research at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Frederick Reines Postdoctoral fellow in Experimental Sciences with Drs. Jaqueline Kiplinger, and Kevin John. Eric began his independent career at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 with a focus on f-block chemistry. His research program at Penn focuses on the chemistry of the rare earths metals and uranium with projects in novel and sustainable separations, earth abundant catalysis and problems in electronic structure. In 2011, Eric received a U.S. DOE Early Career Award and in 2013 he was named a Cottrell Scholar. He has also received the Harry Gray Award for Creative Work in Inorganic Chemistry by a Young Investigator (2016), the U.S. EPA Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2017) and the Inorganic Chemistry Lectureship Award (2020).
Photo courtesy of University of Pennsylvania.