Ellen Matson
University of Rochester, NY·Chemistry
Moving hydrogen atoms and electrons onto and off of metal oxide surfaces sits at the heart of both clean fuel chemistry and grid-scale energy storage. Surfaces of real metal oxide particles are messy and hard to watch atom by atom, which makes it difficult to say why a catalyst favors one product over another.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
polyoxovanadate
polyoxometalate
hydrogen atom transfer
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Determine how hydrogen atoms are taken up at the surface of polyoxovanadate–alkoxide and –carboxylate clusters, molecular stand-ins for reducible metal oxide nanomaterials, mapping structure–function relationships through self-assembly and post-synthetic modification.
- Test which structural features control where a hydrogen atom adds to the cluster surface, comparing heterometal-substituted assemblies and clusters bearing bridging versus terminal oxide ligands.
- Apply knowledge of proton-coupled electron transfer at vanadium oxide assemblies to improve selectivity in the stoichiometric reduction of molecular oxygen toward water or hydrogen peroxide.
- Design biphasic charge carriers for redox flow batteries that store charge both as dissolved molecules and as a solid, controlling solubility across multiple charge states through ligand modification.
- Characterize charge transfer at the electrode–electrolyte and electrolyte–solid interfaces in biphasic systems, and build lab-scale battery cells whose performance can be rationalized from basic physical properties.
More about the research
Work in this lab builds small, well-defined molecular clusters that behave like tiny pieces of a metal oxide surface, then uses them to read out the chemistry directly — and applies related inorganic design principles to molecules that can store charge in flow batteries.
Why it matters
Efficient hydrogenation chemistry and selective oxygen reduction underpin efforts to use hydrogen as a fuel and to electrify chemical manufacturing; atomic-level rules for hydrogen atom transfer on vanadium oxide clusters could guide design of better catalyst materials. The battery work targets long-duration storage that makes intermittent solar and wind dispatchable, addressing energy density and materials-cost barriers that currently limit redox flow batteries.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shiyu Zhang
Ohio State University, OH·Chemistry
Synthesize tricopper(II,II,I) peroxo complexes in cage-like ligands to model the short-lived peroxy intermediate of multicopper oxidases, and characterize their electronic features by spectroscopy.
Mark Lipke
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Chemistry
Measure how water trapped inside redox-active porphyrin nanocages changes the acidity of acid-bearing guest molecules and their combined proton-electron transfer, using electrochemistry and 1H NMR to quantify water uptake.
John Anderson
University of Chicago, IL·Chemistry
Use metal oxo complexes that can be made highly basic to test how separate proton- and electron-transfer driving forces control concerted proton-electron transfer during C–H bond oxidation.
The school
University of Rochester: 38 labs on PI Pages, $492M a year on research, 308 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.