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This symposium is co-hosted by UBC Applied Science, UBC Faculty of Science, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry, and Net0MM-CREATE Program (funded by NSERC).
Join us for an engaging half-day event where our early career professors will showcase their research in sustainable materials and chemistry. This event is open to undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members, providing an opportunity to network and spark impactful research partnerships. Don’t miss this chance to connect with researchers and build meaningful collaborations that drive progress in sustainable materials and chemistry!
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE:
1.00- 1.10 pm Arrival
1.10- 1.20 pm Welcome remarks by Dr. James Olson (Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science)
1.20- 2.20 pm Presentations by Dr. Chester Upham, Dr Douglas Reed, Dr. Eric Lees
2.20- 2.40 pm Networking break
2.40- 3.40 pm Presentations by Dr. Qingshi Tu, Dr. Eva Nichols, Dr. Kiana Amini
3.40- 4.00 pm Networking break
4.00- 4.40 pm Presentations by Dr. Sami Khan, Dr. Alex Tavasoli
4.40- 5.00 pm Closing and networking
PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS:
Dr. Alex Tavasoli – Introducing the Laboratory of Future Industry (LoFI)
The Laboratory of Future Industry (LoFI) studies low-impact chemical and material manufacturing systems that integrate sustainably into the Earth’s natural ecology and our human social environment. LoFI’s research aims to: (1) identify the resource needs of the future low-carbon world; (2) understand the complex industrial ecosystems that enable the transformation of raw materials into economic and social value; (3) design and build innovative chemical and materials manufacturing processes to meet these needs; and (4) elucidate implementation strategies that lower the barriers facing the widespread adoption of these new industrial systems. Working at the intersection of traditional chemical, materials, and mechanical engineering, LoFI’s work pushes the boundaries of how we design, deploy, and use the material production systems in our society.
Dr. Chester Upham – CO2-free fuels and chemicals
The Upham lab studies catalyst materials that accelerate gas reactions in order to produce the fuels and chemicals we use every day in more environmentally responsible ways. This includes the production of clean hydrogen, the conversion of CO2 to useful products, the use of membranes in reactors, and the modeling of large-scale industrial processes. This talk will give an overview of the most exciting new catalyst materials being developed in Dr. Upham’s lab, including molten metals, molten salts, and the clean hydrogen, carbon fibers, and other products that are produced.
Dr. Douglas Reed – Designing New Electrified Porous Materials
The Reed lab studies the synthesis of electrically conductive microporous materials. Many exciting technologies that could leverage porosity and conductivity, like efficient chemical separations and electrocatalysis, are currently unrealized because most porous materials are not conductive. Current synthetic approaches construct porous materials from molecular building blocks and hope that conductive properties arise, which despite decades of research has only produced a handful of suitable materials. The Reed group instead starts with known conductive materials and designs ways to make them porous. This fundamentally different approach promises to impact major areas like greenhouse gas capture, sustainably purifying critical elements, generating clean electricity, and producing clean fuels.
Dr. Eric Lees – Multi-physics modelling of electrochemical systems
Multi-physics modelling is a powerful tool that can be used to quantify energy losses and resolve gradients in electrochemical systems at scales which are not accessible by experiments. This presentation demonstrates how continuum modelling can inform the design of efficient electrochemical devices that reduce CO2 into value-added chemicals, convert water in hydrogen gas, and enhance coral growth in acidic ocean waters.
Dr. Eva Nichols – Molecular Design of Electrocatalysts and their Environments
The Nichols lab is an experimental inorganic chemistry group focused on the development of new molecules and materials that catalyze the transformation of greenhouse gases like CO2 and CO to fuels and chemical feedstocks using sustainable electricity. Particular areas of emphasis are the development of catalyst structure/function relationships and improving fundamental understanding about how local reaction environments influence reaction kinetics, mechanisms, and selectivity. This talk will highlight recent efforts related to molecular catalysts as well as molecularly modified electrode surfaces.
Dr. Kiana Amini – Development of Transformative Electrochemical Systems for a Clean Energy Future
This presentation will focus on my research undertakings and outline my research directions at UBC. The discussion will center around three key technologies: redox flow batteries for energy storage applications, electrochemical systems for effective CO2 capture, and electrochemical lithium extraction from brine resources. The presentation aims to provide background on these systems, elucidate their significance, and detail our strategic approach to their advancement. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on the collaborative opportunities and state-of-the-art facilities that will be instrumental in driving my research forward.
Dr. Qingshi Tu – Applying large language models to create transparent, consistent and accurate life cycle assessment models at scale
Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a fundamental tool that is widely used for improving the environmental performances of technologies and policy instruments. Nonetheless, the accuracy of LCA studies is often questioned due to the two grand challenges of life cycle inventory (LCI) modeling: (1) missing foreground flow data, (2) inconsistency in background data matching. Traditional mechanistic methods (e.g., process simulation) and existing machine learning (ML) methods (e.g., similarity-based selection methods) are inadequate due to their limitations in scalability and generalizability. The large language models (LLMs) are well-positioned to address these challenges, given the massive and diverse knowledge learnt through the pre-training step. Incorporating LLMs into LCI modeling can lead to the automation of inventory data curation from diverse data sources, and to the implementation of a multi-modal analytical capacity.
In this presentation, I will delineate the mechanisms and advantages of LLMs to addressing these two grand challenges. I will also discuss the future research to enhance the use of LLMs for LCI modeling, which includes the key areas such as improving retrieval augmented generation (RAG), integration with knowledge graphs, developing prompt engineering strategies, and fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs for LCI-specific tasks.
Dr. Sami Khan – Innovating at Interfaces: Enhancing Performance and Longevity of Sustainable Energy Systems
Interfaces are ubiquitous, and bottlenecks to performance and longevity in sustainable energy systems often occur due to interfacial interactions. Deciphering and controlling mechanisms underlying these interactions is critical to designing improved and long-lasting sustainable energy and chemical generation systems. My group has developed a novel approach to reduce soot accumulation on biomass combustor surfaces using microtextures, reporting that randomly microtextured surfaces obtained by sandblasting shows a 71% reduction in the time taken to oxidize 90% of surface soot coverage when compared to smooth surfaces at 530°C. We also study grooved microtextures fabricated via laser ablation and find that grooves with widths between 15 and 50 µm enhance soot oxidation, while the expedited advantage is lost when the groove width is 85 µm, indicating that there is an optimal length-scale of surface roughness for this self-cleaning effect to take place. Microtextured surfaces that facilitate soot oxidation upon contact could significantly improve performance and longevity in various combustion applications.
SPEAKER PROFILES:
Alex Tavasoli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Her research group, the Laboratory of Future Industry (LoFI) develops low-carbon chemical and materials manufacturing systems. She holds degrees in Chemical and Materials Engineering from the University of Toronto and held a postdoctoral appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An expert in solar-driven chemical processes, Alex spent ten years developing solar-driven technologies for carbon dioxide capture and conversion, in an effort to sustainably manufacture commodity chemicals, prior to joining UBC. Outside of academia, Alex has several years of experience in Canada’s “innovation sector” having worked at the MaRS Discovery District in their cleantech partnerships practice, run a start-up company, and participated in a three-year innovation fellowship with Natural Resources Canada. She also currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Iron & Earth, a Canadian non-profit that supports the energy transition through worker mobilization, outreach-based research, and community energy projects.
Chester Upham is an Assistant Professor in the Chemical & Biological Engineering department at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Upham was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the SUNCAT Center for Interfacial Science and Catalysis. He holds a PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from McGill University. Dr. Upham’s research focuses on catalyst development for the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals. Dr. Upham has also worked at several start-up companies to develop and scale-up new catalytic processes. Most recently, he worked in multiple roles with C-Zero to commercialize his PhD work to produce CO2-free hydrogen using high temperature molten catalysts. He was also the Director of Development for Carbon Sciences from 2010-2013 and a Process Engineer at Kimberly-Clark. His work has resulted in 8 provisional patent applications, 20 publications in journals such as Science, Nature Catalysis, and ACS Catalysis. It has been highlighted in Chemistry World and Nature Energy.
Douglas Reed is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, where he started in Fall 2022. He received his B.A. from Harvard University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in the lab of Prof. Jeffrey Long, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University in the labs of Profs. Colin Nuckolls and Xavier Roy. His graduate and postdoctoral studies focused on the synthesis and characterization of extended porous materials and molecular clusters with metal-metal interactions, using the unique electronic properties of these materials for industrially relevant gas separations and nanoscale electronic devices. At UW, he and his group design new synthetic approaches to make porous materials for a range of environmental applications.
Eric Lees is an Assistant Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Prior to joining UBC, Eric held an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship position at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where his research focused on the development of continuum models for electrochemical systems under the supervision of Dr. Adam Z. Weber and Prof. Alex T. Bell. Eric obtained his PhD at UBC under the supervision of Prof. Curtis P. Berlinguette, where he built electrochemical reactors for coupled CO2 capture and conversion. The Lees Lab focuses on combining electrochemical engineering theory with experiments to design efficient electrochemical systems for climate-related challenges.
Eva Nichols is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Nichols earned her B.S. in Chemistry from Caltech and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where she worked on a combination of molecular, materials, and biological catalysts for CO2 valorization. From 2018‐2020, Dr. Nichols was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, where she used infrared spectroscopy to study molecularly modified electrode surfaces. Research in the Nichols group brings together synthesis, electrochemistry, and spectroscopy to develop molecular and materials-based electrocatalysts for the conversion of carbon oxides to more valuable products.
Kiana Amini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at the University of British Columbia, having joined in August 2023. Prior to this appointment, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, where she focused on the development of organic and organometallic-based redox flow batteries for energy storage applications and aqueous organic-based flow cells for carbon capture applications. Before that, she earned her master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo. During her Ph.D., she worked on the development of metal-based (zinc-cerium) flow cells for energy storage applications. Her lab at UBC is focused on advancing the performance metrics of electrochemical systems to assist in our transition to a clean energy future.
Qingshi Tu is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Ecology. Dr. Tu has a strong track record of life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA) research on a variety of topics. Dr. Tu is particularly interested in developing decarbonization strategies that focus on the nexus between socio-economic behaviors and technological advancement. Dr. Tu’s research focuses on: 1) creating open-source databases and models for evaluating the environmental, economic and social impacts of emerging technologies, 2) transforming knowledge into user-friendly tools and educational materials, 3) engaging different stakeholders to collaborate on sustainable bioeconomy projects.
Sami Khan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainable Energy Engineering at Simon Fraser University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2020. At SFU, Dr. Khan leads the Engineered Interfaces for Sustainable Energy (EISEn) group, which aims to improve the performance and longevity of sustainable energy systems by fundamentally understanding and tuning electro-chemo-physical interactions at interfaces, with a particular focus on enhancing CO2 capture and conversion processes. He has previously worked in the rare-earth mining industry in Canada and was a Science and Technology Advisor to the Chief Scientist of Natural Resources Canada. He is the recipient of many awards including the Action Canada Fellowship (2021) and the Marcel Pourbaix Award for Best Poster in Corrosion Science (received at the NACE International CORROSION conference in 2019).