Event

Achieving the net zero emission goal necessitates doubling the electricity production by renewable technologies and electrifying the transportation sector. These urgent societal challenges generate a significant gap in manufacturing demand and production, which calls for solutions to achieve resource supply security and advanced manufacturing capabilities. Ions, as the simplest unit for separation and synthesis, are critical to control to enable transformative technologies. In this talk, I will introduce our group’s research in understanding and manipulating ions at electrified interfaces and in confinement for separation and manufacturing. In the first part, I will introduce a platform method, electrochemical intercalation, for selective ion separation. I will introduce several strategies to promote the separation of critical elements (lithium and lanthanides) based on the understanding of complex host behaviors upon co-intercalation of competing ions. In the second part, I will introduce our efforts in developing methods to construct (sub)nanometer solid ionic channels and understanding the intriguing ion transport and interplay in confinement.

Bio:

Chong Liu graduated from Fudan University with a Chemistry major in 2009. She did her Ph.D. at Stanford Materials Science and Engineering during 2009-2015 and her postdoc in the Physics Department at Stanford University from 2015-2018. She joined the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in 2018 as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor. She is named a Sloan Research Fellow and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. She is a recipient of the DOE Early Career Award and MIT TR35 Award. She is currently the Thrust Leader of AMEWS EFRC Center. Liu Group's research focuses on designing and synthesizing materials and developing electrochemical and optical tools to address the challenges in water and energy. Her group studies phenomena that span enormous length scales from molecular interaction to mass transport, aiming to understand and correlate the materials' microscopic properties to macroscopic performance. 

Host. Prof Eric Schelter