Dr. Eva Nichols

The University of British Columbia

Host by: Dr. Wenyu Huang

Inorganic Seminar

Abstract:

Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) is an attractive process to convert this low-value greenhouse gas into a valorized fuel or chemical feedstock. Well-defined molecular catalysts provide an excellent platform to study fundamental chemistry, namely how rates, reaction mechanisms, and product selectivities depend on the local reaction environment of the catalyst active site. Our lab is interested to use these insights to unlock unexpected reactivity.

Iron porphyrin complexes have long been recognized as stable and efficient catalysts for selective production of CO under homogeneous conditions. We have shown that many porphyrins aggregate severely under electrocatalytic conditions and that activity of the aggregates is significantly diminished. Catalyst kinetics can thus be improved simply by altering operating conditions to promote disaggregation. Separately, it is known that installation of protic functional groups in the periphery of a molecular catalyst (termed the Second Coordination Sphere, or SCS) can greatly influence the reaction outcome. The latter portion of this talk will showcase various SCS modifications made to iron porphyrins and, relying on a combination of molecular synthesis, electrochemistry, spectroscopy, and computational insights, will outline the various ways that the SCS can perturb reaction mechanisms and outcomes. I will end with a discussion of recent efforts to access reduction products beyond CO.

Bio:

Dr. Eva Nichols earned her B.S. in Chemistry from Caltech and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where she worked on a combination of molecular, materials, and biological catalysts for CO₂ valorization under the supervision of Professor Christopher Chang. In 2018, Eva moved to Yale University as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor James Mayer, where she used infrared spectroscopy to study molecularly modified electrode surfaces. Since Fall 2020, Eva has been an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.