CHBE 565-International Paper Co Seminar-Prof. Aleksandra Vojvodic, University of Pennsylvania (hosts: Alex Mironenko/Baron Peters) "The Doubly Evolving Interfaces in (Electro)Chemistry for Energy Process"
- Event Type
- Seminar/Symposium
- Sponsor
- Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and International Paper Company
- Location
- 116 Roger Adams Lab
- Date
- Nov 20, 2025 2:00 pm
- Contact
- Christy Bowser
- cbowser@illinois.ed
- Phone
- 217-244-9214
- Views
- 47
- Originating Calendar
- Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering - Seminars and Events
Abstract: The race to solve the sustainable energy puzzle is on. First-principles based computational methods, which balance accuracy and computational cost, are at the forefront to help solving this puzzle. These computational approaches allow one to describe and understand chemistries of already known materials, and, importantly, they can now also be used to predict new materials and their chemistries. Combining these insights with machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can speed up the discovery process further. In this talk, I will first demonstrate how we have been able to computationally predict chemistries of relevance for a green hydrogen economy using complex materials including earth-abundant ones, which have been experimentally synthesized, characterized, and tested. I then share recent insights on the stability and activity of computationally predicted catalyst systems and conclude with our new efforts to understand the dynamic behavior of these complex materials. Throughout the talk, I will pinpoint the unique chemistries and catalysis taking place at the doubly evolving interfaces where both desired and undesired chemistries are taking place. I will conclude by discussing some outstanding challenges and opportunities for the modeling of solid-liquid interfaces. Together, this research agenda aims to replace trial-and-error, time-consuming approaches as the main source of development for new materials and chemical routes with a systematic computational materials modeling strategy.
Bio: Dr. Aleksandra Vojvodic is the Rosenbluth Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Director of Penn Institute of Computational Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on theoretical and computational-driven materials design, in particular on studies of surfaces and interfaces of complex materials for chemical transformations and energy conversion and storage.
She is currently an Associate Editor for ACS Catalysis. She has been recognized as the Trottier Foundation Fellow in Accelerated Decarbonization, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Fellow in Bio-inspired-solar-energy, and was chosen as one of the “Women Scientists at the Forefront of Energy Research”. She is the recipient of the Mellichamp Distinguished Lecture, Young Innovator Award in NanoEnergy, the European Federation of Catalysis Societies (EFCATS) Young Researcher Award, Scialog fellow in Advanced Energy Storage, and of the MIT Technology Review 35 Award which recognized her work and innovative approaches and identified her as “[a] computation whiz that speeds up the search for catalysts that will make green chemistry possible”. She has published more than 95 papers in journals including Science, Energy & Environmental Science, Nature Materials, Nature Energy, Nature Communications and JACS.
Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, she was a staff scientist at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where she led a group conducting research on oxide surface reactivity. She was the Swedish Research Council postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and at the Center for Atomic-scale Materials Design at Technical University of Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the Department of Applied Physics at Chalmers University of Technology and her Master of Science in Physics from Lund University in Sweden.