Research

The current industrial chemical processes and human activities cause growing environmental concerns, thus posing an urgent need to develop new materials to harness sustainable energy and replace fossil fuels. Although materials have been extensively researched for utilizing electricity and light energy for chemical conversion, the process heavily relies on trial-and-error methods, which are slow and inadequate to meet modern demands. Moreover, the need for more efficient and cost-effective materials requires the precise design of materials in the nanoscale. To address these challenges, my research plan aims to (1) design heterostructured nanomaterials with precise control of surfaces and interfaces to gain a further understanding of the fundamental structure-function relationships; and (2) rapidly discover compositional complex materials with desired properties by high-throughput synthesis and big data analytics. The discovered materials will be further optimized to enhance the robustness for practical applications. With these efforts, my group will advance the “Materials Genome” engineering and find new solutions for clean energy techniques and environmental remediation.