MS&E Seminar: Professor Guihua Yu

Speaker: Guihua Yu, Associate Professor

Affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Austin

Designing Functional Organic Nanomaterials for Energy and Environmental Technologies

Nanostructured materials have become critically important in many areas of technology, ranging from renewable energy, electronics, photonics, to biology and medicine, because of their unusual physical/chemical properties due to confined dimensions of such materials. In this talk, I will present an exciting class of polymeric materials we developed recently: nanostructured conducting polymer gels (nCPGs) that are hierarchically porous, and structurally tunable in terms of size, shape, composition, hierarchical porosity, and chemical interfaces. nCPGs as functional organic building blocks offer an array of advantageous features such as intrinsic 3D nanostructured conducting framework, exceptional electrical conductivity and electrochemical activity to store and transport ions, synthetically tunable structures and chemical interfaces, and they have been demonstrated powerful for a number of significant applications in energy and environmental technologies. Several latest examples on nCPGs-enabled advanced energy and environmental applications such as high-energy lithium batteries, self-healing electronics, solar steam generation and water desalination, and atmosphere water harvesting, will be discussed to illustrate ‘structure-derived multifunctionality’ of this special class of materials.

About the Speaker

Dr. Guihua Yu received his B.S. degree with the highest honor in chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China, and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University with Charles Lieber, followed by postdoc research at Stanford University with Zhenan Bao. Currently Yu is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include rational synthesis and self-assembly of functional organic and hybrid organic-inorganic nanomaterials, and fundamental understanding of their chemical/physical properties for advanced energy and environmental technologies. He has published over 100 scientific papers in prominent journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Nanotech., Nature Commun., PNAS, Chem. Soc. Rev., Acc. Chem. Res., Adv. Mater., Angewandte Chemie, Energy & Environ. Sci., Nano Lett., Nano Today, ACS Nano, which have received total citations over 15,000 times. Among a number of notable awards and honors Yu has received, are Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, TMS Society Early Career Faculty Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Chemical Society Reviews Emerging Investigator Lectureship, MIT Technology Review ‘35 Top Innovators Under 35’. Yu also serves as an Advisory/Editorial board member of Chem (Cell Press), Chemistry of Materials (ACS); Batteries & Supercaps (Wiley), Nature Scientific Reports, Energy Storage Materials (Elsevier), Frontiers in Energy Research, Science China Materials, Science China Chemistry, Applied Nanoscience (Springer).

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Mar 02, 2018
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Location:
2101 Engineering V
420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles CA 90095