Title: Catalyst Discovery at the Intersection of Molecules, Materials, and Nanotechnology

Abstract: Developing catalysis platforms for efficient chemical transformations requires either building upon useful empirical evidence or studying unexplored design spaces. Importantly, both approaches benefit from merging different research fields to solve new challenges. Here, I will discuss how materials design parameters can be applied to molecular electrocatalysts in the form of porous supramolecules to mimic confined enzyme/nanomaterial catalysis. Then, I will show how biological design elements can be implemented to augment synthetic catalyst activity through inverse confined catalysis. Finally, I will describe how nanotechnology can transform materials synthesis by confining the volume of reactors to the attoliter scale. This can yield thousands to millions of catalyst candidates on a single chip for testing, and varied molecular sensors prove to be critical in rapidly testing and identifying top performing materials catalysts.

Bio: Peter Smith is a Postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University working with Prof. Chad Mirkin in the Department of Chemistry and the International Institute for Nanotechnology. He completed his graduate studies in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Chris Chang where he developed supramolecular porphyrin catalysts and redox mediators for electrochemical small molecule conversion. His current research merges nanofabrication and molecular sensing to synthesize and screen thousands to millions of new catalysts per experiment, helping to accelerate our materials discovery workflow.