Towards Quantitative Understanding of the Design of Nanostructured Catalysts
Hong Yang
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 206 Roger Adams Laboratory, 600 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA;
hy66@illinois.edu
Preparation of nanoparticle catalysts becomes more and more sophisticated in order to meet the
increasingly stringent structural requirements for advanced performance in high activity and
selectivity. New approaches have been developed in recent years in the control of nanocrystal size,
facet, composition and various core-shell structures in order to tackle the challenges. Such
research endeavors result in a new push for better quantitative understanding of nucleation and
growth kinetics in solution. In this talk, I will focus on our recent work in the following topical
areas: 1) the solution processing of metal nanoparticles, especially the production of uniform,
facet-defined catalysts using carbon monoxide as a processing gas. The formation of shape- and
composition-controlled multimetallic nanostructures will be discussed, including alloys in their
so-called immiscibility regime of their bulk counterparts; 2) theoretical and experimental
understanding of ligand chemistry in the design and controlled synthesis of metal catalysts; 3) in
situ liquid flow cell technology for transmission electron microscopy technique in the
understanding of nucleation and growth of heterogeneous nanoparticle catalysts; 4) in situ, variable
temperature environmental TEM (ETEM) study of structural behavior of catalyst under reactive
conditions; and 5) structure and property relationship of catalysts for the electrochemical reduction
of oxygen and other reactions.
Biosketch: Prof. Hong Yang is the Richard C. Alkire Professor of Chemical Engineering at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his B.Sc. degree from Tsinghua
University (1989), M.Sc. degree from University of Victoria (1994), and Ph.D. degree from
University of Toronto (1998). For his PhD work, he was warded one of the two NSERC Canada
Doctoral Prize in Science. After working at Harvard University as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow,
he started his independent research and rose through the academic ranks at University of Rochester
before joining the faculty of UIUC in 2012. Dr. Yang is an NSF CAREER Award recipient. He is
a Section Editor for Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering (Elsevier) and serves on the
Editorial Boards of Nano Today (Elsevier), ChemNanoMat (VCH), Science China Materials
(Springer), and other journals. His research interests include understanding the formation of
nanocrystals, surface modification, catalysis, and nanomaterials for energy and biological
applications.