报告题目：Multifunctional Hydrogels as An Emerging Platform for Sustainable Energy and Environment

报告人：Prof. Guihua Yu, (The University of Texas at Austin)

时间：7月16日（周二）15:00-16:30

地点：李薰楼468房间

 

　　Multifunctional Hydrogels as An Emerging Platform for Sustainable Energy and Environment

　　Guihua Yu ^1,*

　　Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

　　¹ Texas Materials Institute, UT Energy Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA

　　^* Website: http://yugroup.me.utexas.edu/

Nanostructured materials have become critically important in many areas of modern technology, ranging from renewable energy, electronics, photonics, to biology and medicine, because of their unusual physical/chemical properties due to confined dimensions of such materials. This talk will present an emerging class of polymeric materials we developed recently: nanostructured functional hydrogels that are hierarchically porous, and structurally tunable in terms of size, shape, composition, porosity, and chemical interfaces. Bottom-up synthetic strategies to rationally design and modify their molecular architectures enable nanostructured hydrogels as a bioinspired material platform to address critical challenges in renewable energy and environmental technologies, beyond their traditional biological applications.

These functional gels as organic building blocks offer an array of advantageous features such as intrinsic nanostructured conducting framework, exceptional electrochemical activity to store and transport ions, and synthetically tunable polymer-water interactions. Several recent advances on these nanostructured hydrogels-enabled advanced energy and environmental applications will be showcased including high-energy lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors, electrocatalysts, and solar water desalination and atmospheric water harvesting. 

Biography

Guihua Yu is a tenured professor of Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. degree with the highest honor in chemistry from USTC, and earned Ph.D. from Harvard University, followed by postdoc at Stanford University. His research has focused on rational synthesis and self-assembly of functional organic and hybrid organic-inorganic nanomaterials, and fundamental understanding of their chemical/physical properties for advanced energy and environmental technologies. Yu has published over 140 scientific papers in many prominent journals with total citations over 23,000 times and H-index ～73 (Highly Cited Researcher 2018). Yu has received a number of notable awards/honors, including Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry, US Department of Energy’s Early Career Award, ACS ENFL Emerging Researcher Award, Outstanding Young Innovator named by several prestigious journals: Chemical Society Reviews, Nano Letters, Small, Chemistry of Materials, Nano Research, Caltech’s Resnick Young Investigator, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, MIT Technology Review ‘35 Top Innovators Under 35’, IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists. Yu currently serves as Associate Editor of ACS Materials Letters (a new flagship materials science journal by ACS), and is in Advisory/Editorial Board of over 10 prominent international journals such as Chem (Cell Press), Chem. Soc. Rev. (RSC), ACS Central Science, Chemistry of Materials.