Group Members

The New Year and Internships!

The CCEM group has hosted several visiting PhD, MSC and undergraduate students over the past 5 years, but we’ve never sent any of our members abroad. As of 2022 however, that’s all changed! Both Michael and Kevin have gone abroad to do their own separate internships.

Kevin recently visited the University of Iceland to study under Prof. Hannes Jónsson and learned how to include an applied electrochemical bias in his calculations. While Kevin’s visit only lasted a week, Michael has gone across the Atlantic Ocean to visit the SUNCAT Centre in Stanford University (California) for three months! He will be working with Dr. Michal Bajdich to research common descriptors between heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER).

While the guys have gone to very different climates, they’ve both gone to excellent research centres and are sure to learn a lot! Check back soon for updates on their research.

General

The CCEM Group has been awarded an SFI grant!

That’s right! We’ve recently been awarded a grant from the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) for half a million euro, to research and overcome some of the major obstacles to large scale hydrogen production. In particular, we aim to design economically feasible catalysts that are both efficient and sustainable for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER).

This project will combine both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis to develop novel hybrid catalysts with the advantages of both types of system. Of course, the amount of different catalytic candidates has increased drastically, meaning we will be employing several techniques such as density functional theory, the use scaling relations, and machine learning algorithms to speed up this process.

This grant also allows us to take on two more PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher to work on this exciting project! Feel free to get in touch if you are interested!