About the Seminar:

Title:

Exploring non-covalent interactions to improve electrochemical energy storage and water purification.

Abstract:

Molecular catalysts of transition metal complexes have emerged as candidates for solar fuel production by catalyzing the conversion of energy poor feedstocks into fuels, either photo-chemically or electrochemically in a dark reaction. Molecular containers have shown promise to encapsulate a variety of organic and inorganic molecules, with a recent emphasis on molecular catalysts. With the rise of molecular electrocatalysts especially for energy storage applications, our focus is on investigating the figures of merit of molecular nanocapsules to modulate the secondary coordination sphere of fuel producing molecular electrocatalysts. Here redox active guests are used as electrochemical probes to determine the effect of encapsulation on electrochemical properties. This theme of secondary coordination sphere modulation and non-covalent interactions will also be explored to understand how to improve the efficiency of the proton-coupled electron transfer processes involved in oxyanion reduction for water purification.

About the Speaker:

Bio:

Noémie Elgrishi is a native of France. She received her higher education in Paris from École Normale Supérieure and Université Pierre et Marie Curie – Paris VI. During her Master’s degree she studied host-guest interactions in molecular cages with Johnathan Nitschke at the University of Cambridge and energy storage through photocatalytic HX splitting with Daniel Nocera at MIT. In 2015 she completed her PhD under the guidance of Marc Fontecave in Collège de France in Paris investigating electrochemical CO2 reduction catalyzed by molecular complexes of first row transition metals. She then moved to UNC – Chapel Hill in 2015 to pursue postdoctoral studies under the mentorship of Jillian Dempsey working on mechanistic investigations of proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) processes.

She joined the LSU chemistry department as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2017. To learn more, visit the Elgrishi Research Group website.