The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering is hosting a seminar presented by Gyeong Hwang, Paul D. and Betty Meek & American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professor, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, April 2, at 4:10 p.m. in ADBF 1002/FLOYD 256 (Tri-Cities).

Dr. Hwang is the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professor in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin).  He received his BS (1991) and MS (1993) from Seoul National University, Korea, and his PhD (1999, with MS in Applied Physics) from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), all in Chemical Engineering. He also carried out post-doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (1999) and Caltech (2000-2001). Since joining UT-Austin as an Assistant Professor in 2001, Dr. Hwang has developed his research program in computational materials and chemical science. He has been involved in many top-notch research projects concerning the electrochemical properties and performance of nanomaterials and molecular systems for energy, electronics and environment. Dr. Hwang has published more than 180 articles in high-impact journals. He has given more than 130 presentations as an invited speaker, including plenary and keynote addresses at international conferences. His professional career has been recognized with multiple prestigious awards and honors, including KSEA Engineer of the Year Award, NSF CAREER Award, and ECS F.M. Becket Memorial Award.

Accelerating Materials Discovery and Design through Computation

The discovery and design of new materials has long played a key role in enabling technological advances across a wide range of industries. Over recent years, a variety of nanomaterials have been synthesized and tested as promising catalysts especially for clean and renewable energy applications. However, in many cases, little is known about their properties and performance, despite the criticality of such a fundamental understanding for the accelerated development of new catalytic materials. Experiments may provide many clues to the behavior of those materials, but the interpretations are often controversial due largely to the difficulty of direct characterization. Under such circumstances, computational approaches have emerged as powerful alternatives to the design and understanding of new materials and processes. This talk will focus on introducing our ongoing efforts in first-principles modeling of nanomaterials for catalysis.  In the first part of my talk, I will present recent progress in our collaborative theoretical and experimental efforts to explore photocatalysts with the requisite band gaps, stability, costs, and abundance for solar-powered hydrogen production. In particular, this talk will highlight the effects of crystal structure and doping on the photocatalytic performance of BiVO4 that has recently garnered considerable attention due to its high photocatalytic activity for water splitting and pollutant decomposition. In the second part, I will discuss design strategies to improve the performance of carbon nanomaterials for use as oxygen reduction reaction catalysts in fuel cells and gold-based bimetallic catalysts for the direct synthesis of hydrogen peroxide.